


Sugarbitches

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age II
Genre: 1970s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-17
Updated: 2013-02-17
Packaged: 2017-11-29 15:31:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 23,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/688544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In this gritty re-imagining, Kirkwall takes its mid-1970's vibe from such classics as Coffy and Dirty Harry.  Hawke and her crew work hard, play hard, and take no guff.  There's crime enough to keep them busy, and a sinister undercurrent running from the Qunari gangsters all the way up to City Hall. But in this city. . .her city. . .justice is sweet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Left, Hawke, LEFT!” Aveline bellowed as Hawke corrected, wheel jerking, and the car lurched from the right lane to veer across traffic. No one could hear the screech of tires over John Bonham’s guitar wailing from the stereo, though, and Aveline’s grip on the handhold was as tight as the clench of her teeth. Angry headlights screamed through the GTO’s low windows as they made the turn.

In the rearview, Hawke watched three bodies shift like bags of laundry across the back seat. But they were on the right end of town for once tonight, even if they’d been on the wrong end of the fight.

“Blood on the upholstery, love, sorry,” Isabela said, shoving at the lifeless bundle between herself and Merrill. His black hair was mussed, loose of its pompadour, and even slack as a popped bow-string he was definitely a looker. 

“Girl, you get stuck?” Hawke craned around. But Isabela was clean, already wrist deep in the chump’s pockets, pulling out a square of silk and a swank wallet.

“Oh, not ours. His, of course,” Merrill offered, holding onto the seat on front of her, bright voice pitched over Aveline’s shoulder. She smiled at Hawke and then gasped, “Mind the curb!” 

Too late. The GTO bounded up, briefly, and avoided taking out a newspaper stand by a nug’s breath as Hawke muscled the wheel again. Four on the floor, tires and Zeppelin on the radio fighting for grip, and Hawke gunned it for Darktown, headlights eating up the bridge as they crossed. 

“Almost there,” she rumbled, palming the stick and sweating through her gloves. 

“Almost dead,” called Isabela, and it wasn’t as funny as it could have been. Almost was still too close for Hawke, and she needed some rich shitbird bleeding out in her car like she needed a second asshole. The bull-heads had nearly given her one for free, and she still had no idea what they’d been doing in Lowtown. 

She swung the front end up and to the right, pulling away from the bridge, and jammed her foot on the accelerator. Three blown red-lights later, Brona General swam into view and Hawke released a breath she’d practiced holding since she flicked her first fireball as a little girl.

From the backseat, their handsome passenger stared, glassy eyed, and Hawke couldn’t tell if he had any breath of his own left. It pinched her more than she liked, to think of him slipping away. He probably had a nice voice. Maker knew he might have a clue what the Qunari were up to.

“Come on kid, blink those baby blues for me,” she cooed and slammed the GTO to a stop just inside the emergency zone, snapping the stereo off. For a minute everything was quiet, Aveline surged out of the car, flipping the seat forward for Merrill, and then the spill of BG’s cool aqua light stuttered with black shadows as nurses rushed out with a gurney.

* * *

Brona’s coffee was weak, but Hawke sucked it back and crushed her fifth cup of the stuff while she paced the cramped waiting room. Ever few laps, she’d had to step over Isabela’s long legs stretched between the rows of chairs. Big windows that had been filled with black just two hours prior were now creeping to lavender as morning arrived in Darktown.

Merrill sat cross-legged on the linoleum playing cat’s cradle with a little boy, pink twine coming in handy after all. Hawke ran through how she’d tell Varric what use his gift was coming to out here, the boy’s dark face and bright, black eyes measuring Merrill as her fingers twisted the string like a pair of crafty spiders. He seemed to like her dainty tattoos, and the point of her ears, what could be seen anyway, sticking up from the fluff of her curls.

The boy’s father had fallen asleep sitting in his chair, chin dipping onto a mat of chest hair between the super-wide spread of his collar. He’d been there since before they’d piled into the emergency room with the rich kid, and Hawke wondered what this guy’s personal tragedy was tonight. 

She hoped it hadn’t involved gilt-horned gangsters.

“You can come on back,” said a thin voice behind her.

Anders stood in the swinging door to the emergency wing, Aveline like a ginger gargoyle at his shoulder. Bless him, he still had that dumb pen in the pocket of his bloodstained scrubs, pigeon feathers taped around the end. Hawke nodded. 

“Think he’ll talk to us?” She asked as they pushed through into the corridor.

“I think he’s lucky you were there,” Anders said, rubbing long fingers from his temple to where all that hair became sideburns. _Hippie_ , Hawke thought, pitching a glance at his sandals as he went on. “Mild concussion, fractured ribs. We stitched up the stab wound, must have been a small nug-sticker ‘cause it wasn’t deep.”

“Tell that to my backseat,” Hawke muttered and shook her head when Anders raised an eyebrow.

“He did scream a lot, at first,” Merrill piped up.

They passed a few operating rooms, their eyes gliding beside the small windows with fleeting glimpses of late-night consequences. Hawke didn’t turn, and neither did Aveline, but Isabela gawped at all the blood and tears, elven faces gripped with pain, and a couple of humans who’d gotten their asses in a sling over some kind of bad deal. Mages mad at each other for shit they couldn’t change.

Anders led them into a curtained area at the rear of the trauma care center.

“Don’t overstay your welcome,” he said, dropping his clipboard into a box on the wall. “Not supposed to let you back here, so try to . . .you know.” 

“Low profile. Got it, babe.” Isabela winked and whisked the curtain back so it hissed, sudden as startled snakes in the quiet room. On the bed, their blue-eyed rich boy barely stirred.

“Can you poke him awake or something?” Hawke asked, crossing her arms, leaning over him so far that her shadow crept over the neck of his gown and covered his face. Yep, still a looker alright. 

“Hey, he’s had a rough night,” Anders said, low, and ducked his head as a pair of elven nurses walked through the recovery room at a clip. Isabela sat on the edge of the kid’s bed, nudging his hip with hers where her white dress rode up.

“Our little Fontleroy here is Kirkwall royalty, dincha know?” She said, twirling a heavily ringed finger through his limp hair. When they all glanced at her, staring, Isabela pulled his wallet out of her bra and held it up for Hawke.

Inside the sumptuous leather, Hawke found a tatty ID card and teased it out of its pocket. She whistled, thumbing the corner.

“‘Saemus Dumar’? Oh! Like the Mayor,” Merrill said, reading over her arm. 

“Think a cat like that wants to wake up knowing nobody’s on the case?” Hawke turned it to Anders, holding the evidence close to his pointy nose.

He sighed, shoulders dropping. 

“Cool it. Okay, I’ll see what I can do.” 

Anders yanked the curtain back around so they were all enclosed, leather creaking as Aveline was crammed up against the beeping machines and Hawke’s staff bumped Merrill’s. When he was sure no one was looking, Anders worked the magic Hawke knew. The real stuff. Fade-blue and white, burning bright over Dumar’s face. 

But the Mayor’s son didn’t wake, just kept breathing evenly, synched with the blip on the screen beside Aveline’s shoulder.

“He’s just too deep. Good meds or good magic, I can’t tell which is working better for him,” Anders said, balling his hands, and Hawke had never known that particular ache from magic. Not like him. He gave her a weak smile, because it was just that kind of night. “I’ll give you a call when he wakes up.” 

“Probably skedaddle as soon as his pants are dry, but yeah,” she said, nodding. “And thanks.”

Anders walked the four of them back to the swinging doors and into the waiting area. He rubbed his eyes and Merrill plucked the pen from his pocket, twirling the feathered end like a tiny staff. 

“Hey, give it back.” Anders grabbed for it, but she held it away, running the fluffy gray feathers over her cheek where the tattoos dipped to curled points. 

“Sugar, that thing’s probably filthy,” Isabela said. “And not in a good way.” 

“Oh, I don’t know,” Merrill replied, teasing the pen across Isabela’s cleavage, teasing a generous smile from her lips. 

“Will you two can it?” Hawke took the pen, dropped it back in Anders’ pocket and glanced through the window of the swinging door. Saemus Dumar. If that wasn’t a bad omen . . . “Anders, have there been any others like him tonight? Anyone who’s obviously not local?” 

Before he could answer, a voice spoke up from behind them. 

“There’s a bull-head hanging around the discharge desk. Says he’s looking in on a friend. Won’t say who.” 

Bethany appeared at Hawke’s side, all braids and sweetness. Except for the splash of blood across the bottom of her skirt.

“When did you get here?” Hawke hugged her sister, planting a kiss on her temple. 

“Ten minutes. Had to tell Carver I was headed for the library,” she said, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her denim skirt. Up on her tiptoes, she looked through the door. “That one was there tonight. In the alley where we found the boy.” 

She jerked her chin toward the recovery wing. They turned back to the window to see a bull-head skulking down the hallway from a side door. His black suit swallowed up the light, bulky, with pinstripes as stark-white as his hair, and the nurses gave him a wide berth. “Look at the rip in the shoulder. Oh, I remember that face.” 

Her solemn voice made Hawke nervous. It had been a Carta thing, they’d figured. Some black-market shitstorm that went south in a hurry. What were they doing mixed up with the Mayor’s kid?

“Fuckin’ Qunari. Their tailor must make a killing.” She swayed toward the door, watching the bull-head swing his face from bed to bed, searching, and her staff-hand went tight on instinct. “They all look the same.” 

“Not when they care,” said Bethany, chin on her shoulder. “Look.” 

As they watched, Aveline and Isabela crowding one window while Hawke and Anders fogged up their own, the Qunari stepped into the last curtain on the end . . .and took Saemus’ limp hand.

Hawke was holding that breath again, the precious kind chock-full of worry, as she saw the massive thumb sweep gently over the back of Dumar’s wrist.

“Well, now I’ve seen everything,” Anders murmured.

They couldn’t even nod. It was just that crazy. 

Then, Merrill made a sound in the back of her throat, something Hawke associated with a love of kittens and kids, and it meant that this whole mess promised to be harder than they thought. She watched the Qunari’s horns tip high as his chin lowered. The motherscratcher was praying, or something like it. Eyes closed and everything. If that didn’t beat all. 

She backed away, leaning against the wall.

“What in the void is that all about?” 

“Seems pretty clear to me, doll,” Isabela said, still gazing through the small window.

“Maker.” Hawke scrubbed her face and jammed a hand in her jeans, searching for ten-piece. “Okay, I gotta make a phone call. Aveline?” 

“Heading back to the precinct.” She retrieved her badge from inside her leather duster and hung it from the chain around her neck, right over Wesley’s class ring. “Whatever else you’re thinking of doing tonight, Hawke. _Don’t._ ”

It didn’t have to be such a hardship to be the only law-abider in the group, or even the only law-bringer. But Aveline never did anything that wasn’t as hard as her jaw. When Hawke gave her a mock-hurt face, Aveline just deepened her glare. Then she was gone, standard issue KPD boots squeaking all the way out of the emergency room. 

Anders left them, disappearing back into the bustle of the morning shift-change at the hospital, and whatever passed for a lull in Darktown’s bleeding chaos. As she ducked into the phone alcove, Hawke watched her baby sister, Isabela, and Merrill take up spots on the chairs overlooking the front windows where day had broken fully on the city. Ochre melting on the blue, jagged skyline beyond the bridge.

Hightown slept, and woke. It stuck its fingers into the city like a greedy kid with a pilfered pie. Hightown reaped the city’s rewards, but didn’t make it run. Not in every way that stank and sweated and broke. They had no idea what went bump in the night, what was slinking closer to their fine doorsteps. If the bull-heads could take on Carta creeps in Lowtown, Hawke figured it wouldn’t be too much longer before Hightown found itself bereft of that privilege.

The line buzzed. 

While she waited, a male orderly approached, and like Anders he sported sideburns. He pointed to her chest, and the rebel symbol spray painted there, and gave her a casual high five as he passed. 

Right on. Except that was years beyond forgotten now. That was gone, daddy, gone. Wasn’t it? 

The line clicked and Hawke heard the coiled cord scraping someone’s nightstand. 

“Now, I know of only one individual who’d call me at such an unholy hour,” said the man on the other end. If stubble and whiskey and compulsive lies all got together and had one voice, it’d sound like Varric Tethras. 

“Tell me a story,” she said, leaning on the phone like it was a broad, dwarven shoulder. 

“I can’t just get it up like that, baby, you’re gonna have to give me something to go on.”

She’d have smiled if her jaw didn’t still ache from getting a kisser from a big, gray fist.

“Take a Lowtown Carta deal, throw in some angry bull-heads and a Town Hall boy who shouldnt’ve been there, and what do you get?” 

“A whole lotta nothing that makes any sense. Hold on,” Varric said, and put the phone down to rustle up something or other. Hawke fingered her staff where it rested between the phone and the corner of the wall. Scratched all to Void, but it was better than most, and had been even when it was her dad’s. Few things carried that kind of worth across generations. She tugged on the bandana tied around its shaft. On the other end of the line, Varric returned. “I have a buddy, a PI friend from back in the day who feeds me intel for _The Spill._ He’s been in town looking into Blight stuff, nasty, but he tells me that the Qunari are moving product in the boroughs. And moving it like, well . . .like gangbusters.”

“Drugs?” She couldn’t remember seeing any, but then there hadn’t been time for investigating while they’d dodged horns and blades.

“Like you’ve never seen,” Varric said, sleep-gruffness falling away from his voice to make it something closer to what she knew: interest, intrigue, incorrigible.

Hawke glanced at the chairs where the man and his son were long gone.

“Go on,” she said, and shoved a hand through her hair, exhaling loudly in the phone alcove.

“If Qunari are moving in Lowtown that means Carta, Coterie, hell even KPD have lost their hold on everything that side of the bridge,” he said, and it was like drawing thick, red lines across the streets from the Alienage all the way up to the river. Varric made a dry, chuckling sound and continued, “They just don’t know it yet.”

They seemed to sigh at the same time, separated by the whir of the phone line and the buzz from BG’s cheap lights overhead. Hawke did smile then, watching Merrill at the window beside Bethany as they traced shapes in their breath on the glass.

“Did we hang a sign on the city somewhere down the line?” She asked, kicking at the wall with her boots, leaving marks among a hundred others who’d stood hunched into this phone and been far angrier for better reasons. Hawke huffed. “Give us your weirdos, your cultists, your gray-faced masses yearning to corrupt the weak?” 

“You’d think the statues in the bay would be a deterrent, but no,” Varric replied. 

“What about the kid? ID says he’s the Mayor’s boy.” 

“Can’t help you with that one, sorry,” he said, and it sounded pure, genuine. “You got the legs, now go do the work.” 

“Watch it, buster.” 

Varric made a satisfied grumble then, and she heard him pulling on some clothes. 

“Hawke, be careful.” He stopped moving around on the other end of the line. “You’ve got some wicked magic. Shit I’ve never seen on any mage or man. But it can’t get you out of jail. Not in Kirkwall.” 

“Don’t need magic to end up there, Maker knows,” she replied, then added, “but it helps.”

“Touch base?”

Such a gentleman. She knew better. 

“You know it.”

Hawke got her ten-piece back from the phone, re-slung her staff, and ambled across Brona’s morning emergencies to where Isabela stood in the waiting room. 

She was tired, but not done by half. Her lips were still red and her dress was still white, platform boots putting her head and shoulders above everyone, and Hawke thought she looked like a dark, disco figurehead straight off the front end of a clipper ship.

A mermaid that could knock your teeth out and wear them like a string of pearls.

When they stood together at the window Isabela spoke in a low whisper. 

“Couple of oddball hangers-on joined our little party at some point tonight.” 

Hawke nodded, squinting through the morning haze, and found the black convertible Cadillac easily enough. Broad daylight didn’t do much to hide the contingent of bull-heads camped out in the parking-lot. They’d be sweating in those identical suits before long, if they even did something so familiar as sweat, and Hawke watched their stone faces as they said nothing to one another. Just sat, watching the hospital entrance. 

“They come with loverboy?” 

“Bethany says no,” Isabela replied and crossed her arms. “They showed up a coupla hours ago. Giving me the damn creeps.”

She shook her head and then turned, chin pointing to the opposite end of the panorama in the window.

“And, until about ten minutes ago, that sneaky cat was standing just outside. Smoked like a chimney, too. Check it out.”

“Which?”

Isabela pointed first to the pile of cigarettes beside the far pillar at the entrance, then to the corner newsstand where a few commuters were picking up their morning papers. When Hawke was about to ask exactly _which_ sneaky cat she was looking for, Isabela smirked.

“The marmalade.”

A snappily dressed man ducked behind his _Kirkwall Times_ after glancing at the hospital. Hawke took in the brown suit and vest, the whole nine and then some in fancy wool and a russet silk pocket square. All of that topped with flaming red hair. Poor sucker.

“You wanna stretch those legs, mama?” She asked, winking at Isabela and taking the answering smile for all it implied.

“Any time,” Isabela said, and thumbed Hawke’s chin as she added, “but if I’m going deeper into that pinstripe snake pit you owe me something sparkly.” 

“What are we doing?” Bethany asked, sidling up to Hawke’s elbow. 

“You’re going to tail the bull-heads with Isabela and Merrill,” she said, stretching a whole night’s worth of kinks from her shoulders. “And I’m gonna go see where this tomcat lays his head.” 

“We should get a bite for lunch after,” Merrill said, cracking her tiny knuckles. And the Hanged Man loomed large enough for all of them, as much as it did on its dingy block in Lowtown, that it didn’t even need to be said. 

Hawke handed her car keys over to Isabela, keeping her peepers trained on the ginger man folding up his poor excuse for a hiding place and tucking it under his arm. Tomcat was heading up the block, toward the subway station. 

“Catch you later, babies.” 

Hawke hoofed it outside into daylight, determined to burn it her way for once.


	2. Chapter 2

If she’d thought about it, leaving her staff with the girls would have been smart. 

But, then, she’d never been accused of thinking too much.

Though there were a few others on the crowded train, mages in leisure suits and fringed vests with the odd scrap of wood slung over their shoulders, it still made Hawke a standout. So she kept to the back, put her big boots up, and watched the red-headed man from between the sway of working stiffs. When he glanced around occasionally, she ducked her head to study the angry tangle of blue-black grafitti on the backs of the seats. 

 _I’d suck Andraste’s tits!_  

 _Fuk Templors!_  

 _wade + herren_  

They crossed the river, and Hawke tracked him to the platform at Circle Station and onto the H-1. Express to Hightown. Which didn’t surprise her in the least. He even seemed to relax once the doors shut and the whole of Darktown became a blurry memory, dropping away in the subway tunnel behind them. 

She watched him cross his legs and open the newspaper. 

Overhead, the speakers played _Close to You_ and Hawke wanted to laugh and groan at the same time. It figured. Carver loved the fucking Carpenters. But the man bounced his fine, Antivan shoe on his knee and went on being oblivious. 

By the time Karen was singing about why all the girls followed him around, the red-headed man stepped off the H-1 and booked it up the steps onto a tree-lined boulevard, deep in Hightown’s wealthiest residential district. 

It was a damn-sight harder to be inconspicuous on this end of the city, but Hawke had been in more outlandish disguises than she could count. So, she put on her best Amell, even if it was only in her face and her ramrod spine, and strode among the ten-sov suits and the Gucci purses as if she belonged. Because she might have had holes in her jeans and blood on her knuckles, but this was where she came from, and if she couldn’t exactly _be_ that anymore she could at least take some power from it. 

If she squinted and thought of her mother walking just there, her hair, her hips, and her advice that almost never failed, it didn’t even feel like pretending. 

A coat would have been nice, though. She shivered and tucked the numbing ends of her fingers into the palms of her gloves. 

Polite trickles of steam poured from the gutters over the swift feet of Hightown’s movers and shakers, and the scent of roasted nuts made her stomach rumble. The corner vendor made a great cover, though. So while the red-headed man waited to cross Thalsian, Hawke stood under a cheerful awning and forked over a handful of coppers for a warmer handful of honeyed cashews. 

It only lasted a few minutes more after they crossed the street.

As she sucked sugar from her fingers, gliding along beside the wrought iron fence around someone’s mansion, Hawke watched the man climb the stoop of a stately brownstone, wipe his feet like he’d been ankle-deep in nugshit, and disappear inside.

She fished a pencil nub from her hip-pouch and scrawled his address on the empty cashew bag. It was just past ten in the morning. If the bull-heads were just as precise as the tomcat, Hawke figured Isabela, Bethany, and Merrill were already headed to the Man to reconnoiter.

Sweet as the nuts had been, Hawke was still hungry, and maybe a little thirsty to boot. It was five o’clock somewhere in Thedas, she reckoned, and high-tailed it back to the subway station with the Hanged Man’s jukebox already playing in her mind and the smell of stale beer in her nose. 

* * *

 

There was a stop to make before she could wet her whistle. Because it was only a hop-skip from the hoity toity end of town, Hawke took the train to KPD’s headquarters and rode the elevator up to the fifteenth floor with an officer escorting a young elf in handcuffs. He grinned up at her from between greasy hanks of hair, pupils blown, and Hawke stared back. His teeth were mossy, green, and he blinked slowly under the elevator’s harsh glow. High as a kite.

They got off two floors below her destination, and when she slid out into KPD’s staff offices Hawke was rubbing her tongue across her teeth, still thinking of the elf teen and his nasty grin, some reflexes too keen to ignore.

Her staff felt heavy in its sling, and her skin warmed under the eyes of cops who passed her, but Hawke met each and every one. Protect and serve meant everyone, even her, even mages and reckless vigilantes, and the Vallen name on the big office at the end of the corridor meant Hawke had a place here as much as anywhere else in the city. 

“Officer Brennan,” she said, approaching the clutch of busy desks in the central office. “What’s the skinny?”

The woman looked up, leaning around two stacks of files to see Hawke standing there. She tucked her pencil into her ponytail and eased back, chair squeaking. 

“Well I’m guessing you’re about to tell me,” she said, smiling her canted smile to someone who was more than happy to cut right to the chase. 

Hawke smoothed the spotty cashew bag on Brennan’s desk and tapped it. 

“There’s a beauty of a house at this address,” she said, turning the paper to face Brennan. “Don’t suppose you could tell me who lives there?” 

“All these favors we do for you, Hawke,” Brennan said, not touching the bag, “when we collect one day it better be worth it.” 

“Let’s just say you’ll be pleasantly surprised.” Hawke watched her pick it up between two fingers like it was dipped in bronto shit. 

“Hendyr!” Brennan called, and stretched her arm out behind her to flap the paper sack in poor Donnic’s face. Though, he was on the phone, one thick mutton chop of a sideburn pressed to the receiver, Donnic took the paper with a nod that Brennan didn’t even acknowledge. 

Hawke wondered how long he was destined to sit behind her in the pit before moving up in rank. Glancing at Aveline’s door across the room, smiling to herself, she figured the smart coin was on Handsome Hendyr’s imminent promotion. 

Brennan kicked a chair out, eager for Hawke to stop looming, and Hawke obliged by sitting on the edge of the desk instead, plopping her sewer-rank boots on the seat of the chair. 

“Punk,” Brennan said, reaching for a new pencil from the bristling cup beside Hawke’s hip. And sure, she could have reminded Brennan about the one stuck in her ponytail, but where was the fun in that? 

While Donnic dialed, and Brennan ignored her, Hawke watched the heart of KPD pump its lifeblood into pointless piles of casework for criminals who paid their drivers and cooks better than Kirkwall paid its finest peacekeepers. What passed for peace was a joke told by gangsters over unmarked graves and stolen property, after all.

Carver and his Thedas-history textbooks would call it a _quest_ if he’d known what they were up to. Right after he called her an idiot. What it was, in the brass-tacks of it, was an alternative. She and the girls against what went bump in the night. And maybe it wasn’t by the book but Hawke knew it would have made her daddy proud, and her mama worry. 

And that’s usually how she knew she was into something good. 

If there was a point in mentioning all the scumbags they’d put down, each Darktown headache she and her crew had saved Brennan, Hawke would have done it years ago. Maker knew that with Aveline sitting on her temporary throne in the Chief’s office that their _unsanctioned dispensation of justice_ (as Bethany had put it) might have been a fact Brennan knew well . . .and well-enough to keep her trap shut about. 

 _Mutually beneficial_ , Isabela had said. 

 _A bloody good time_ , Merrill had added. 

 _Right_ , Aveline had replied. 

None of them had been sure if she meant it had been a good idea or that she’d actually had fun taking the law into her own hands when she wasn’t punching a time-card for it. 

Hawke suspected a little from column A and a lot from column B.

“Never pegged you for a political animal, Hawke,” Donnic said, breaking through Hawke’s reverie to wave her over. He passed her the paper bag with a name printed neatly beneath her chicken scratch. 

“Rings a bell. Just not sure which one,” Hawke murmured, frowning. 

“Well, because I’m the helpful sort, here you go,” he said, and yanked a three-day-old _Times_ out from under his files, toppling them. But Hawke put out an arm, righting the pile and taking the newspaper. Donnic exhaled, grateful for her reflexes. 

Under the fold, staring out of the drab, monochrome newsprint that hid his crowning glory, was her marmalade tomcat. 

“ _Bran_. Ah shit, he’s the Mayor’s chief of staff?” 

“S’what it says.” 

She rolled up the paper and smacked her palm with it. 

“You’re a real peach, Hendyr, thanks.” 

He picked up the phone again and Hawke took off for the elevator, spinning on her way out of the pit to issue a broad salute to Brennan. Who flipped her the bird. 

Chief of Staff sniffing around the Mayor’s kid. Hawke’s stomach rumbled, but that was no kind of answer, even if it was honest. She only hoped Varric had pried open the right doors to get at what they needed, and she’d be at the Hanged Man in two shakes to finally map out the full shape of the mess they’d stepped in.

But, standing at the elevator, Hawke overheard voices in the opposite corridor, panicky hisses like foxes in a snare, and she craned her head to listen.

“He promised us. But only if we do it peaceful-like.”

“Templar’s word’s worth two things to me, jack and shit.”

“Don’t leave me here.”

“Come on, we can still give em the slip.”

Baby mages, lost in the woods. Hawke sagged against the wall. 

One thing at a time, he’d told her every time she got too far ahead, _one-spell two-spell three-spell, break_. Order in the chaos of steps and sweat, and Dad’s knee bending when she’d hit the ground. Orange slices and sips of lyrium-spiked Coke in between practice bouts. Sweet and cold, even when there wasn’t ice to be had. 

She didn’t need to collect any more lost marbles today. No, she didn’t. So, Hawke’s warning bells were still ringing, sounding like the elevator coming and going, when she slipped around the corner and approached the mages. 

“Sounds like you’re in a jam, kiddos,” she said, scanning their dirty faces, ragamuffins in cuffed jeans and rough-living backpacks that’d probably served as pillows in the park for a week or more. 

“The fuck do you care? Hit the bricks,” said the girl with the pair of tattoos flanking her cheeks. She’d been pacing, and while Hawke took up the hallway in front of her she just rolled her eyes. Pains-in-the-ass weren’t all related to her, but Hawke would have sworn on a stack of Chants they were all related to _each other_. 

She sighed.

“You know, registration isn’t everyone’s bag,” she said, and yanked her staff from its sling to show it to the boy and girl still seated on the bench. “But, if you’re already in trouble-” 

“We haven’t done anything, honest,” said the boy, his amber eyes jumpy as tree-frogs, skittering over the staff and then to the floor. He mumbled, “Starkhaven’s a flaming crater and we just. . .” 

“You’re from the North end of Freemarch?” 

“ _Were_ ,” said the girl sitting beside him. She pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them. 

Hawke knelt on the cold linoleum.

“Look, I know a guy, a real ace with this kind of thing,” she said, but the girl still pacing the hallway snorted. Hawke, turned to the other two, voice low like her Ma’s used to be when something was supposed to sound real important to a couple of sniffling kids. “You could get yourself set up nice with him if you’re on the fence about registering here.” And it wasn’t easy to hear how she failed at being the nurturing type, but if anyone needed her to try, it was these three. “Kirkwall’s not winning any mage-pride pageants, Maker knows.” 

The dark haired boy couldn’t even look at her as he shook his head and said, “Thanks, but-” 

“But they’re doing the right thing. So step aside and let them.”

Behind the tall girl stood a templar in full-gear, gray uniform broad and tight with the flaming sword patch across both shoulders, and his voice made her shrink onto the bench beside her friends. All the fight leeched right out of her.

“You got a name, officer Chops?” Hawke stood, fingers tight on her staff, right over the bandana tied to its middle. He had two bars that she could see, gold and prissy, pinned to the red fold of his collar. And did every swinging dick these days have those sideburns?

The templar’s eyes remained dead, trained on the three teens like a golem from a fairy tale.

“Lieutenant Karras,” he said, and gestured for the kids to get up. They jumped on their thin, jackrabbit legs and he reached for his belt pouch. Karras produced three sets of bracelets, turning to the tall girl first, and he didn’t look up from his work when he spoke to Hawke, sounding about as warm as a statue, too, as he said, “Unless you want to flash me your redcard I suggest you stick your nose in someone else’s business. 

Redcard her ass. Hawke’s skin flushed to a prickle. 

“I just might, because yours smells like nugshit,” she said. But he was already moving them single-file down the hallway, wrists chained together and tinkling lightly. Hawke fell into step beside Karras. “Since when are free mages handcuffed for turning themselves in? For trying to register?” 

“Orders of General Stannard,” he replied, like it was the best thing since sliced bread. Then he smiled his golem’s smile. “And thank the Maker for ‘em.” 

The kids looked back over their shoulders as he guided them toward the elevator, and Hawke realized they weren’t staring at her but at the backpacks they’d been forced to leave behind. And she felt about as invisible as she figured she should. 

It was dubious loot to snatch from a trio of snot-nosed mage babies, but Hawke shouldered their packs along with her staff, and tried not to think about all the what-ifs she’d stolen from them, too.


	3. Chapter 3

Merrill finished spinning the yarn she’d been gathering up all day, sputtering potato chips and making her sandwich into the big, black Caddy they’d tailed from the hospital through Darktown. She pushed it around her plate to where they’d ended up. Dockside, with a pickle wedge serving as the boats in the harbor. When she was done, wiping her fingers dainty as you please, Merrill let Bethany nosh on the pickle. No Saturday night cop serial could’ve told it better, Hawke thought. 

Warehouse District was all she needed to know, and Isabela nodded, thieving a few chips for herself. 

“Making all kinds of friends today. Not even half past noon.” Varric pushed his bifocals up his nose and muttered down at his grubby notepad, “Might wanna slow down, Hawke. You’re throwing off the rhythm.” 

She drank, and drank deep like he was talking about templars and bull-heads instead of her third pint. From her perch on the back of the seat, Isabela took the half-empty glass (and weren’t they all, lately?) and rubbed between Hawke’s shoulder blades absently. 

“Don’t listen to him, you’ve got great rhythm,” she said. 

“No, he’s right.” Hawke straightened in the booth and cracked her knuckles, leaning into Isabela’s knees at her back. “This private dick of yours, he come up with any leads?” 

Like she needed some Johnny Come Lately to tell her what was what in her town. Hawke downed the rest of her beer, and it hit a little south of the creeping truth in the pit of her stomach.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Varric replied, reaching into his breast pocket, and tossed a small, glass vial onto the table. It rolled off the edge into Hawke’s palm and she held it up to the overhead light. Inside was a gray-green powder. Varric cleared his throat and said, “What you’re looking at is called gaat. On the street, you can get a couple of ounces for just under two silver. Cheapest high in the city, ‘specially on the sketchy side of the river.” 

“Never seen it,” said Bethany, plucking the bottle from Hawke’s fingers.

“Sunshine, I could write encyclopedias on what you’ve never seen.” 

“Mm, think so?” She asked, mouth thinning as she ran a fingernail down the oily, stacked pages of Varric’s true-crime rag _The Spill._  

“This is bull-head dope. Coterie won’t tangle with them,” Hawke said, taking it back and twisting off the cap. It smelled like nothing she knew. Damp ash, maybe, mixed with chlorine, but not even that. Not anything Freemarch or nearby. She recalled the elf in the elevator, his near-black eyes swallowed up in haze, and his mossy teeth.

Cheapest high, but steepest fall. 

And though she’d never turned down a good time, learned from Isabela not to fault anyone for theirs, Hawke couldn’t shake the mood it gave her. She capped the bottle and tucked it into her pocket, saying finally, “I’m guessing the Carta can’t get the Qunari to play ball, either.” 

“Got that right. The guilds are clamming up tighter’n rat’s asshole.” 

“Bad stuff, that,” said Merrill, sitting cross-legged in her chair, bare feet poking out the sides and sandals long forgotten on the floor beneath the bar. She swigged her lemonade, spiked with Corff’s rot-awful moonshine, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, “Worst kind of storm’s comin’ when even the big ships batten down the hatches. And, how do you _batten_ something anyway?” 

“My little sailor’s all grown up,” Isabela said, and leaned over to ruffle Merrill’s poofy curls. 

Wasn’t a storm they’d ever seen this side of the beaten harbor that looked like this one, though. No kind of storm came with impeccable, red ties and sweeping horns. And, Hawk thought, easing out of the booth to amble toward the door, no city so divided could weather it without all hands on deck. 

She thought of Saemus’ hand in the bull-head’s, a crusher like that with a tender touch. They bled like anyone else, sure, but did they smile? Did they fuck and did they love? Inside her pocket was a dram of poison for an answer, and it was all she had to go on. 

So she went. 

“Meet me at the Rose tonight?” She asked Isabela at the door, midday glare from the glass bouncing around the Hanged Man’s gloom as she pushed it open and stepped out onto the sidewalk. 

“I’m getting my sparkly after all,” Isabela said, approval humming from behind her lips, as she stretched her arms to the edges of the doorframe, leaning out and filling Hawke’s space with white lace and cleavage. 

“Something like that,” Hawke said, quick smile chasing blood out of the cut on her lip. She fingered the tip of a dagger peeking up from behind Isabela’s shoulder. “But bring your own, just to be sure.”

“And the kids?” Isabela’s eyebrow swerved. 

“Home. If they know what’s good for them.” 

Then, she turned and headed there herself, Lowtown crowding around her shoulders at every corner where hustlers and hucksters waggled their faux-jeweled fingers at each other. 

Magic supplies hung from half-soaped windows, the shared scent of hot metal and woodwork enticing, even if the mustachioed Rivaini working the register was not. Hawke shoved past the window-fogging mages cluttering up the sidewalk and kept her head down. Across the street, fundamentalists had set up shop with bay windows full of crossbows and shortblades. All behind heavy, wrought iron bars, of course. 

Weapons and wonders. The whole square mile of Lowtown’s market district was just a headache waiting to happen to any poor kid with less sense than power.

And just enough money to be dangerous. 

Which was true of most of Kirkwall, if she was being honest. Here, though, everything happened to have no sheen, no guile, and no silk pillows for presentation. Lowtown was a working girl. It was hairspray and sensible shoes. It was the handbag you kept to the inside shoulder, never to the street. It was eye-contact and a haggler’s sense of worth. 

It smelled raw, too. Lowtown perfumed itself as much with the scent of greasy, local food spilling from the open doors as with body odor and tailpipe flatulence from the perpetual parade of delivery trucks through the avenue. It was the reek of dry cleaners and wet aprons; labor and luck where they yellowed everyone’s collars equally. 

Hawke sidestepped the snakeskin loafers of the smooth talkers kiss-kissing from their rickety café tables. Where the checkerboards were faded but permanent. Where diamondback meant the shirt off your back, and they rolled their cigarettes with elfroot and flagrant curses. 

Ducking down the subway entrance, Hawke added her pocket change to the music rattling from the first grimy paper cup that reached out to her. She grabbed a copy of Varric’s rag from the _Spill’s_ box against the station wall and then she slid onto the train bound for Hightown.


	4. Chapter 4

It wasn’t all dirty work. 

True, they spent their vigilante hours splashing in Kirkwall’s muck and dust, but they also let their hair down, too (or teased it up), and Hawke wasted none of those opportunities when they came. 

So the Blooming Rose was hard work at its finest, and dirty in every way.

Hawke followed Isabela through the crowd, and Aveline trailed Hawke, disco thudding from wall to wall in the dark club. As promised, it sparkled, and they hadn’t needed to glide up in white limos, like a few of the velvet-rope types who were now tucked away in private booths, in order to feel just this side of supernatural. It practically rained on them like glitter. Beyond the music, the Rose boasted six stages for performances, gleaming poles alive with lithe bodies, and crystal dripping from every chandelier so that the rainbow of lights swiveling from above never stopped moving, never settled.

The club was thick with skin and sequins, three stories of debauchery in constant flow to the music, and Hawke watched Aveline knock more elbows than she rubbed, scowling at a boy on roller skates who wore only a sweatband and a smile.

After a quick circuit on the ground floor, Isabela handed them both drinks and jerked her chin toward the upper levels.

“Come on, she’s got us a table waiting,” she said.

“We need to keep moving, though,” Aveline shouted across Hawke’s shoulder.

“We need a base of operations, Chief,” said Hawke, and turned to find Aveline struggling to make it up the stairs, holding her beer high overhead, while a pair of elven ladies sandwiched her in an impromptu dance. Until that moment, she’d never looked helpless in all the years Hawke had known her. Aveline politely declined their invites, and their insistence, and pushed her way up the stairs in a fashion Hawke was much more familiar with: woman-shaped battering ram, in straight-arrow leather and steel-toed boots. But, even in blue-jeans Aveline stood above most people, and it didn’t always mean she looked down at them, but it was just another type of uniform. 

The Rose was an event, a stakeout, and it required them to blend in, find their groove and shake it a little. She would have rolled her eyes at Aveline’s plain hair and lack of makeup, her visible, staunch refusal to play any part but the one she made for herself, but then Hawke herself hadn’t had much of a makeover for the night, either. Isabela had connived her into red leather pants and a pair of pumps, but her torn, black t-shirt stayed put; sleeves rolled up onto her shoulders. Her hands had a familiar, screaming itch for her staff, which was locked in the trunk of the GTO around the corner. Of course, Isabela always looked like she was going to the club, and sometimes like she’d just shut it down, too. 

They wound their way across the second floor, bright leaves riding the current of Kirkwall’s party people, and found their booth on the opposite side; a decked out pair of button-tufted sofas, a table holding a second round of drinks they hadn’t even ordered yet, all overlooking the entire ground floor from behind a low railing.

It was perfect, of course, because Serendipity had been their go-to gal. 

She was perched like a princess on the end of the sofa, skinny legs crossed under a wiggle dress slit right up to her hip on one side, pointed ears tinkling lightly with a dozen piercings. Hawke took the hand she held out and helped Serendipity to her stilettoed feet, kissing her knuckles and drawing a throaty laugh.

“If you ever stop doing that I’ll kick you out myself,” she said, turning to Aveline to add, “Lusine’s got the boys in gray on a rotation so they’re never gettin wicked behind closed doors all at the same time.”

“Likes them out in front, eh?” Aveline asked, already scanning the floor below. 

“Void! We all do. A flash of that templar patch in the crowd and these animals stay mostly civil,” Serendipity replied, pitching a quick wink to Hawke. “Mostly.” 

She thought about the little glass vial in her pocket, and how much green powder might be linking their bull-head problem to the jackboots in Martial gray. But dope was only a symptom. A tool. And like any tool, Hawke knew a person could flip a perfectly mundane hammer around with a quick twist and turn it into tomorrow’s headlines. She put a hand on Serendipity’s arm and leaned close. 

“We need an office key off of Stannard’s personal guards, doesn’t matter who.” 

“Cake. As in, piece-of. I’ll tell Jeth,” she replied, earrings shimmying when she nodded. “Can’t trust humans to do elf’s work. No offense.” 

Aveline’s eyes narrowed.

“Thanks, you’ve been a real doll,” said Hawke. 

Serendipity’s smile was the Rose’s best kind of currency. She made for the stairs, tight dress holding nothing back, and turned to waggle her fingers at the three ladies.

“Come find me when you punch-out and we’ll dance, sugar.”

“You can dance in those?” Aveline asked. 

“Honey, I can do everything in these.”

A quick scan of the ground floor, the sweeping staircase, and the second story told them they had four tin-men getting their jollies upstairs and at least two wandering around the club. 

Aveline stayed at the table, too stiff and conspicuous to do anything but observe, and while Hawke followed Isabela back downstairs they let themselves hope, openly, that Lady Lawbringer might loosen up before too long. Hawke had seen Aveline have fun, but it was the sort of thing she needed a Polaroid to help her remember. 

Finding members of the Martial Forces in a crowd of disco queens wasn’t difficult. No, the hard part was getting them on the dance floor, picking their brains and their pockets while smiling, and getting out of their grabby arms once they were no longer useful. Hawke was pure gold at the last part, but she needed Isabela for the first. So, they worked the club together. 

At the end of an hour, Hawke was sweating to Donna Summer, tonguing salt from her upper lip and searching for any waitress who’d remember to bring her a cup of water with her next shot. And Isabela kept dancing, arms raised so her dress rode high across her ass, and those legs made the temperature in the room climb, too. She looked for Hawke through the wet tangle of hair in her face, blowing a kiss over the heads of oblivious revelers. 

That it was loud made no difference to Hawke, that it was smoke-choked and writhing didn’t change the job or the fun of it. When she was more sweat than glitter, Hawke whistled to Isabela and they made their way to the third floor with Aveline bringing up the rear like a severe bodyguard. 

It was quieter, but not by much, clientele needing just a little of the bass rattling the drywall to remind them why they were here. Hawke led them through a knot of red-carpeted hallways toward the rear rooms, imported silk wallpaper clinging to every corridor, and a dense fog of some Orlesian perfume mixed with wet sex that seeped from the closed doors they passed. 

When they rounded a corner, they nearly flattened Jethann coming out of his room. And because he did everything like a pro, Hawke barely felt the key going into her palm as he apologized for the collision and bid them goodnight on his way to the elevator. He didn’t even look back, just hitched his satin running shorts a little lower on his hips and disappeared when the elevator chimed open. 

“We should come here more often,” Isabela said, wistful appreciation pulling at her brows. 

“No we shouldn’t.” Aveline cast a worried glance up and down the hallway and then motioned for them to move. Though she’d vocalized every way that this little mission made her twitch, Hawke admired Aveline’s willingness to work within their renegade mindset. She was better at it than she’d ever say. Aveline buttoned her coat and headed for the elevator. “We got what we came for. Let’s go.” 

Like any night drenched in neon and drowning in booze, though, this one wasn’t done with them.

The big, bronze elevator doors slid open, splitting their little group portrait reflected there, and revealed Carver Hawke’s too-small wing-collar shirt, open to the sternum, all his heavy muscle wrapped over nerves, and his dumbstruck face. 

“Balls! Mare, I just. . .uh,” he stammered and rubbed his arm, looking down at the elevator buttons like they were his only friends. Carver went crimson in seconds flat. 

If she could be proud and delighted and mortified for her brother, Hawke figured her own face managed it better than words. It usually did. He hated that part.

“Coming or going, little Hawke?” Isabela crossed her arms under her breasts and Hawke nudged her with an elbow. Carver bit his lip. She stepped aside and held her arm out toward the hallway. “Mmm, both then?” 

“Carver, you don’t have to sneak off to get off, you know.” Hawke marveled at her own strength. Few people could watch her brother’s brand of apoplectic embarrassment and not burst out laughing. “Or you tired of your tube sock already?” 

Aveline rolled her eyes, but she was smirking, too. For any of them who knew her, it was as close to sharing a laugh as she was going to get. 

Somewhere down the hall, a woman shrieked in carnal delight, followed by a muffled groan. Carver shrank against the back of the elevator. 

“Maker, I’m. . .no. I’ll just. Are you going home?” 

He wouldn’t step out, so Aveline and Isabela crowded in on either side of him, mismatched bookends for a saucy tale Carver would never live down. Hawke faced him instead of the closing elevator doors. Maybe he was praying for the floor to swallow him up, but it just wasn’t happening, and to her everlasting joy she found the elevator to be as slow and merciless as one of her own gang. 

“So, you’re a . . . _member_?” Isabela asked.

“You get your card punched tonight?” Hawke asked. 

And like all her favorite movies, there came a twist Hawke couldn’t have seen coming if she’d had a telescope and x-ray vision. 

“Keep at it. After ten you get a freebie,” said Aveline, deadpanning without looking at anything but the wall. 

“Big girl, you’re bad.”

Isabela reached up and high-fived Aveline over Carver’s slumped head as the elevator stopped. 

Their merry band sailed through the Rose’s disco with only a handful of people grabbing handfuls of the grumpier Hawke as they passed. Carver squirmed past the roller skating imp and his roving eyes, ducked his head at the black-eyed mage twins in Tevinter-draped dresses who flanked him, rubbing his arms while writhing to _Ring My Bell._  

Hawke suspected he’d have let himself enjoy it, let any interested parties ring his bell if she’d just scram. Luck and lasciviousness made it so Hawke herself was never on the wrong end of a cockblock, but Carver’s attitude adjustment would require a sledgehammer. 

It wasn’t her fault she was the oldest. He’d just never gotten over how their life wasn’t a contest. And wouldn’t that be the shittiest sweepstakes ever? 

They pushed on toward the entrance, two panels of stained glass done up like the most lewd roses Hawke had ever seen, past the doors that spilled them out into Hightown’s black velvet lap. Cool air slapped them, sweet and sharp, like they’d paid for the Rose’s royal treatment, and Hawke steered her troupe around the cavalcade of platform pumps and mustaches still waiting to get in. 

Around the corner and three downhill blocks later she saw the GTO parked where she’d left it, orichalcum-vapor streetlamps turning it from black to sea-green. Something fished out of an ancient mariner’s pulp dream of hard-tops and grippy tires. 

As she pulled her keys out, though, Isabela snatched her arm.

“We get the funniest kind of hookers this end of town,” she said softly, and Hawke squinted to see the black shape of horns, shoulders that didn’t need their bespoke pads but had them anyway, all leaning against the back end of the car. 

“Is that a-” Carver said over her shoulder, bumping into her where she’d made an abrupt stop. 

“It is,” said Aveline, going around him. “But which one?” 

“Well, I spent all my sovs tonight,” Hawke said, sucking cold air that’d be hot enough in a minute. “Let’s hope he takes silver.”

He was upright and hands-out by the time they got within twenty feet, white hair pulled back and a brow so heavy no light fell in his eyes. 

“Peace, bas,” he said when Isabela reached for the only piece she needed. 

“Sure thing, hatchet-face,” she replied, and drew the dagger anyway. 

“What’s a nice ox like you doing in a place like this?” Hawke put herself forward, tall as she was ever gonna be and still two feet less than she needed. Somewhere behind the bull-head her staff was doing fuck-all for her, locked in the trunk. 

Still, she could throw if she needed to. But the Qunari looked down and folded his hands across the impeccable buttons of his suit, seeming to struggle less with strategy and more with words. 

“I’m Ashaad,” he said finally.  
  
“I can dig that,” Hawke replied, nodding. “Mind telling me how you found us?” 

“I am Ashaad,” said Ashaad again, though he trailed off. 

Behind her, Carver snorted a laugh and then shuffled back a little when both Hawke and Ashaad whipped him a withering look. 

“It is my . . .ah, purpose.” 

“He means that’s what he _does,_ ” Aveline said. “Have I got that? Recon?” 

Ashaad nodded. They didn’t spook as easily when he took a step forward, big hand wiping slowly down his face. Hawke watched him look around the alley, horns casting crazy shadows on the pavement. He crossed his arms.

“You can tell me what happened to my friend.”

For a moment, Hawke tried to suppress her delight at the thought of Qunari holding hands and sharing milkshakes. For a moment this Ashaad featured in a pretty hilarious pre-show cartoon. 

But Saemus Dumar was right there in the middle of the joke, getting backhanded by an angry bull-head, ripped open by a dwarven nug-sticker, and bleeding out redder than the GTO’s upholstery. So it happened that her streetside solicitor was no regular Qunari. 

Hawke’s smile faded. So did all the things she’d like to think made her different from this blockhead. 

“How about you tell _me_ what happened to Seamus?” she said, and mirrored Ashaad’s stance. “I only caught the denouement, shitbird. Seems like you could provide the prologue.” 

“Because he’s sure to know what denouement means,” Carver muttered. 

Hawke lifted an eyebrow, waiting. But Ashaad only stared down, past her, seeming to watch the flicker of aqua light on Hightown’s asphalt. Isabela shifted closer without a sound, touching her arm against Hawke’s as a strategy, reflex between soldiers long used to closing ranks. And if she knew Aveline, Hawke guessed that Ashaad’s silence, his bulk and his proximity, had her twitching to get at the shortblade snapped against her back under that leather duster. 

Instead of a fight, though, they got a pinstriped brush-off. 

Ashaad ground his jaw, gray skin rippling briefly, and turned to the downslope of the alley. She was about to call him back, walk after him, when he rounded slowly, arms limp at his sides but no less dangerous. 

“It makes no difference, bas, to tell you to be ready,” Ashaad said. “But know that Qunari shadows will block the sun in this city. From the lowest to the highest.” 

“That a fact?” Hawke asked, smile returning. “I gotta say, for pushers in pretty suits who live like wharf rats you’ve got a helluva lot of product confidence.” 

Ashaad’s chest expanded as he took a breath, took a menacing step, and Hawke’s arm sang with unspent fire. 

“You saved him. This has been your only protection from _me_.” Ashaad pointed a long-nailed finger at Hawke. “But not from the Qun.” 

He was gone before Aveline crossed the alley to Hawke’s side, just a glimmer of golden ear-cuffs winking out of sight, and the quiet whisper of black, Seheron wool. 

“What say we blow this joint?” Hawke asked to no one in particular, voice caught in a pocket of nerves in her throat.

Aveline nodded, unbuttoning her coat.

“I need a bath,” Isabela said, exhaling, and ignored Carver’s sidelong glance. Instead, she pulled him toward the GTO. “C’mon kid, you can have shotgun if you sit on my lap.”


	5. Chapter 5

The tub took one sweat-soaked Rivaini with no room for Hawke. So she straddled the little bentwood vanity chair and hashed out the night’s findings with Isabela between bubbles and the distraction of soap-slicked legs. Merrill brought wine into the bathroom, sat with them for a drink beside the tub, and got herself intoxicated as much on the Rose’s recounting, and the thrill of Qunari horns, as the merlot. 

Hawke hugged her goodnight when she yawned, knowing that, like most nights, Merrill’s intention to sleep would end in wandering the apartment she shared with Isabela in spurts of spellslinging and cleaning. She’d flip open some beetle-eaten grimoire and tote it around like a colicky baby until she passed out on the sofa with the thing crushed against her chest. 

The bathroom door shut behind her, the smallest click to signal the start of Merrill’s routine.

Hawke rubbed her eyes, grinding the heels of her hands into mascara and sooty khol. 

“We don’t need more dope in this town. Things are bad enough,” she said. 

Isabela snorted. 

“Things are bad? That’s why dope exists, sweet thing.” She pulled a washcloth across the back of her neck, over the wet strands of hair that had escaped the bun piled on top of her head. “Dope’s just following the downward trend.” 

Not everything had to hit at once. Hawke stripped off her gloves, chucking them onto the aqua tiles beside Bela’s dress, and ran her hands over the top of her head, stretching. She tipped the chair forward and teased apart the bubbles to plunge her hand into the tub. The water was still hot. 

“This isn’t like kicking some dirty snake comin’ up out of the gutter, though,” Hawke said, swirling the water until Isabela’s belly and thighs were visible under the surface. Dark skin prickled by heat and fingernails. She sighed and found brown eyes steady on hers when she lifted them. “This is a tall horse to ride in on. I can’t promise we won’t get knocked off.” 

“Been knocked worse places,” Isabela replied, lacing their fingers together somewhere between the bubbles and the underneath. She didn’t smile. 

“It’s not just the gaat,” Hawke said. She pulled away and let the chair drop back on its four, solid feet. The bull-head dope Varric had given her was still burning a hole in her pocket, but the worst lump was in her throat. And it didn’t feel like any drug she’d take willingly. “You didn’t see those kids, Bela. Scared shitless by uniforms that’re supposed to protect them. All of that was what we could’ve been. Me and Beth.” 

Who the void was she to tell them to fight a dragon with only a promise? What had any Hawke ever done but run? If that was the most consistent lesson her daddy could muster, Hawke had spent too long giving him the wrong kind of credit. Under all that hiding, though, they’d had three squares and a roof for more years than they didn’t, and about as many smiles as tears. Would a redcard have given them as much? 

Even then, Hawke smirked and wiped her wet hand across her shirt, even then the magic had been Ma’s kisses and her cool eyes. 

“Coulda, shoulda, woulda,” Isabela said after a moment. “There isn’t a dictionary in the wide world that can tell you what those words mean.” 

She looked down at her gloves on the tile floor, frayed at the cut-off fingers and the right one worn almost to brown-gray in the center of the palm. Handcuffs on kids, and a bull-head romance gone south. In the hallway, she heard floorboards creak and Merrill’s mumbling. 

If they pushed into Lowtown like big-ass, besuited oxen, if the senior Dumar was left with his dick in the wind, there’d be more than blood in the streets. It’d be blood-magic fuckery and Hightown hand-wringing. And what did rich folks do when the rats came a little too close? 

The thought of Martial law, of Stannard’s _rules,_ soured in Hawke’s mouth like weeks-old milk and cutroot. 

She ignored Merrill talking to herself in the kitchen on the other side of the apartment. 

“What if this-” she began, but was cut off by the squeak of the bathroom door. 

A different elf altogether stood in the doorway, stiff shoulders hunched under his leather vest. The only one of them who wore heavier boots than Hawke herself. Smoke plumed up from his lips, past the grown-out mohawk of nearly the same color, and Fenris nodded at them both. 

“Apologies,” he said around his cigarette, carrying his mostly bare torso and his freaky, Northern formality across the bathroom in a couple of lanky strides. He squatted beside Hawke and palmed the wine bottle like it was his long lost beagle. Squinting at the label, he removed his cig and said, “I was. . .delayed by a larger contingent of riff-raff than usual.” 

“We had our rough patch, looks like you did, too,” Hawke said, rubbing his back over the faded symbols on his jacket. His hair had gotten long over the points of his ears, one of the earrings she’d gotten so used to had been ripped out. “What was the plan, Fen?”

“Same as every night,” he replied, picking at the label with dirty fingernails, leaning into her hand where she’d swept his hair aside. He lifted the bottle to them both in a vagrant’s toast. “Fight and forget.” 

“You’re colorful tonight,” Hawke said, pointing at the roadmap spatter of blood across his face. From the side, it seemed like he smiled, but that’s how he did everything. 

“Mm, just my shade,” said Isabela. He pulled slugs of wine and let her wipe away someone else’s lost dignity from his cheeks.

As he drank, Hawke took his cigarette and made it her own. From the chair she could see his pale tattoos slashing in an elegant curve past his waistband. Knowing where they stopped, how to start them up, didn’t mean they ever got old. Fenris had the ears, of course, but he didn’t have the history.

“Every elf from Elgar to the bridge wants to sell me shoes, shivs or shepherd’s pie,” he said, standing with the wine. He looked down into Hawke’s face, giving her that earnest look, just shy of blown-out bitterness. “Do I seem rich?” 

“You don’t seem poor, and that’s close enough for government work,” she replied, hooking a finger into his studded belt. He closed a hand around hers. 

“They do not work for-” 

Hawke laughed and Isabela huffed, splashing water onto his boots. 

“Darling, gimme a scrub if you’re gonna be so prickly.”

Fenris finished the wine in two impressive gulps, bending to pass a heady kiss to Hawke. 

“Whatever you like,” he said to Isabela, setting the empty bottle on the floor. 

He knelt on the tile, all tattoos and tamped temper. Hawke watched him dive for the washcloth, a green-eyed Northern wind blowing goosebumps on Isabela’s neck. 

Too few days ended like this lately, and her motor’d been hot since the Rose’s dance floor with nowhere to really open it up.

She wondered if he missed it as much as they did, and guessed that him being here at all, muscling through Darktown’s delinquents on his own, was her answer. 

While he washed Isabela’s back, elbow-deep in suds, lips already lost under her filthy mutterings, Hawke joined him on the floor. She slipped her arms around his ribs, hips behind his own, red leather bracketing black where their legs were so alike, and the pants she wore might have been his for all she knew. She peeled his vest off, replacing the spike-studded shoulders with a trail of kisses, and he was warm enough, revved and groaning when she reached for his belt buckle.

They abandoned the bathroom, Isabela leaving puddles across the tile and cold water standing in the tub, ignoring towels in favor of Hawke’s tits and Fen’s teeth. It was a ruckus of thundering heels, on and off the threadbare rugs, sucking sounds and Arcanum gibberish carrying them through the apartment. 

Merrill barely lifted her head from the sofa to watch their pre-dawn train to fuck-town make its way past her. She waved sleepy fingers at Hawke over Isabela’s shoulder and conked out again with her book. 

They managed to kick the bedroom door mostly shut before hitting the bed with all six knees. 

Hawke kissed the old scars and Isabela the new, trading the day’s bruises for better redness. Fen disappeared sometimes right in front of them, eyes squeezing shut like trying to remember a lullaby just out of reach, some kind of nonsense that meant more than he’d say. Because he never said much. But they’d learned long ago that even ghosts blushed when properly adored. When they didn’t have to be anything but free. 

“Come on, baby,” Hawke said, lifting her hips to meet his. If she had more to add it went straight to Isabela, climbing over Hawke’s face to meet Fen’s mouth while he fucked. So Hawke gripped the thighs beside her ears and licked Isabela’s soap-fresh sex dirty all over again.

The bed, always the loudest conversant in their group, squawked and shuddered under Hawke’s back. No corner store jigsaw puzzle was ever like this, old shapes with their edges worn round, that barked at each other and still fit, making pretty pictures a body didn’t have to step back to enjoy. 

Fenris with his hate and his ticklish neck. Isabela with her freedom and her mouth full of love. And Hawke, who considered every inch of their slapping skin to be a goddamn modern miracle. 

“Mercy, girl!” 

Isabela ground down on the words between her teeth and the tongue between her legs. 

“N-never,” Fenris stuttered, smirking, taut and kiss-raw, pulling out to let Isabela finish him, and Hawke left sticky and breathless under them both. 

Hawke lazed, braced by cooling flesh, half the sheets twisted onto the floor like an escape plan gone wrong, but none of them slept right away. She listened to their breathing and watched the whorls of Fen’s tattoos change color when the neon sign across the alley from Isabela’s window buzzed from blue to red and back again. 

Propped on her elbow, Hawke fixed him with a look.

“Say, you know the bull-head tongue don’t you?” She asked, wondering again how he’d gotten his earring torn off. And because she was staring at it so hard, he touched the gouge and gave her a nod. With her mouth, she followed his fingers, tonguing the long groove of his ear and whispering, “Then I’ve got a job for you.” 

For all anyone knew, he might’ve been born on a Wednesday, and he might’ve been born in a barn or a castle somewhere up North, but Fenris wasn’t born yesterday. 

“Your jobs have a habit of ending in blood and tears.” He reached for a pack of smokes that weren’t anywhere near the bedstand, huffing and twisting to get a better look. 

“Not all of them,” Isabela offered, always the quickest to recover, and walked her fingers across Hawke’s hip, over the instant twitch of Fenris’ stomach to take his dick in her hand. 

“I know,” he said, and forgot he was looking for the pack of cigarettes when she moved on top of him.

* * *

 

Mid-morning came masquerading as twilight when the rain hit, dark and light fighting each other for what made it through the windows, and Hawke woke to the smell of coffee and cooking. 

She dragged an old shirt over her shoulders, a faded blue trophy from a story Isabela might have told once or twice, and buttoned the bare essentials before crossing the apartment to find Merrill.

“ _Then ma falon?_ ” 

“Looks that way,” Hawke said. 

She passed the kitchen table, snagged Fen’s pack of smokes, and headed for the open window in the living room. Out on the fire escape, Hawke settled down, sitting on the window ledge like a cooped up kitty cat, and watched Darktown gather itself in the lull between showers. Every shop with an awning suddenly everyone’s best pal. 

Merrill appeared beside her with two plates, balanced perfectly, and a pair of mismatched mugs. 

“I was a waitress in the Anderfels for a season,” she said, perching beside Hawke and poking at her scramble. “Wasn’t the best job, y’know, but it paid for expeditions to the Hills.” 

Hawke ate like only the well-laid do, chewing for politeness, but the mash-up was good and greasy. And she’d have listened to Merrill on an empty stomach anyway. Her hair was wild and her feet were dirty and Hawke had never known an elf, or anyone really, that spoke as many languages . . .or kept as many demons. Merrill was literal, dangerous, and the kindest soul Hawke knew by name outside of her departed mama.

“You cooked, too, didn’t you?” she asked, forking egg scramble into a biscuit. “In Nevarra?” 

“Yes!” Merrill leaned back to set her plate on top of the TV. She hugged her knees, sipping coffee she never really liked because all her friends seemed to think it was the best. “Made breakfast and lunch on a riverboat. Tantervale to Nessum and back again. Oh, it was so queer to be surrounded by land and still get seasick.” 

“Must’ve made good coin, though.”

“I suppose. Whatever I made went into more travel,” she murmured, bare toes tapping at the raindrops trapped on the fire escape. “Never thought about saving it. What for?”  
  
It wasn’t a scoff. Not from Merrill.

“Pretty things, maybe. New provisions.” Hawke shrugged. 

“There are pretty things everywhere that don’t cost a copper,” she replied, big eyes turning to the blue-gray tangle of thunder clouds overhead. “Isabela, and the rain, and the fireworks on Feast Day and. . .do you think I need a new staff?” 

“Your staff’s perfect, baby,” Hawke said, setting her empty plate on the fire escape. When she reached for the pack of cigarettes Merrill stopped her. 

“Oh wouldn’t you rather join me. . .?” She teased a spliff from behind one pointed ear, invisible under all her curls. Hawke had never considered what a smart hiding place Merrill’s big hair was. Kept as many secrets as the elf beneath it all. 

“Love to.” 

They smoked Merrill’s joint until the rain started up again, and Hawke let her dish fill up with water. Leaning out, they caught fat, fresh droplets on their tongues and all the travel jabber turned, like so many doglegged highways, back to Kirkwall. 

“Been here longer than any other place,” Hawke said, passing the joint. “What makes you stay?” 

“It doesn’t feel right to leave just yet.” Merrill toked and Hawke watched her tattoos shift as she smiled the saddest smile no one would ever see. How grey was bright and also dim, whether it was clouds or ink or heroic hijinks. Her voice was deepest, Hawke knew, when Merrill was mixing up fate and family again. “There’s something to finish, isn’t there? There’s always something.” 

She could lie and dress it up pretty. That shit was always free and it was a rare cat that didn’t eat it up like ice cream about to melt. But Merrill knew the score. She wrote it on her arms with a sharp little knife. 

So there was no answer for what never ended. They’d been seeing it since they were kids, this comically apt symbol on every grimoire and ratty story book across Thedas. With all its industry and life, Kirkwall was still just a snake without enough sense to tell its own tail from a t-bone. 

Hawke stayed quiet as the rain went heavy, beating down the awnings until they were soggy, and there was nowhere for people to stand where they wouldn’t get wet.


	6. Chapter 6

“You’re late,” said the dark-haired man from his perch.

“So’s Andraste. But we love the old gal anyway.” Hawke wanted coffee. She wanted a bath. She wanted an umbrella. But nothing ever came just from wanting it, so she stood beside Howe in the bus shelter and watched the KPD crime scene crew in their orange and gray ponchos. 

“When?” She asked. The figure under the rain-soaked sheet could not be mistaken, and they hadn’t even covered him completely; dignity counting for less than extra postage. 

“A day, maybe two,” Howe replied. “Kids fishing from the overpass spotted him.” 

“What a catch.” 

Beside her, the PI flexed his jaw. 

“This is your Dumar’s mess. It’s the scout, Ashaad,” he said, like she didn’t have a brain in her head. Like she still couldn’t tell them apart. Howe reseated his hat, giving her a better view of his eyes beyond that crooked nose. “And it’s not funny.” 

“When you see me laughing you can tell me that shit,” Hawke said, keeping her eyes on the horns that rested on the pavement. Someone’s fearsome doll left out in the rain. “But not before.” 

“A month of skulking around this open sewer and I can tell you plenty.”

“Don’t step on your dickmeat doing me any favors,” she said, and gave him her full attention, arms crossed.

Howe opened his jacket, a faded army relic in blue with an Amaranthine patch over the left breast pocket. He lifted a camera to his face. But there was another sling, a tapestry guitar strap running across his chest, and Hawke suspected it went to something with strings that sang a totally different tune nestled against his back. 

“The Qunari aren’t your problem. It’s the Martial Forces.” He clicked off a few shots, thumbing the advance lever so quick she barely caught it. 

“Templars don’t truck with drugs, not the kind that don’t give them power,” Hawke said. If the bull-heads had tried their meaty paws at breaking through the Carta’s lyrium trade this whole shitshow would be so clear. And over before it started. 

“That’s the pattern though, and it’s about creating a panic,” replied Howe, snapping a cap onto his lens. He turned to her, stepping close to be heard over the din of rain on the shelter’s roof. “Kirkwall’s different because of the bull-heads, but Martial ran this game in Starkhaven.” 

She sucked the inside of her cheek, eyes cutting back to the nonchalant officers shielding their coffees beside the barricade, and Howe added, “At least that’s what the evidence points to. And it’s possible Chantry’s wise to it.”

“Encourage the rabble-rousers and work it so they have to step in?” 

“Bingo.”

Blue lights bounced between the craggy shore and the seawall, bright even in the rain, and the coroner’s van backed itself up to the police tape. Hawke wondered if the van’s suspension would hold out once they’d loaded the river-bloated Ashaad inside. Bull-heads were a better-or-worse part of a city that hadn’t exactly rolled out the red carpet, and she suspected the lack of kossith-sized coffins was just the start of how they’d never fit.

The only one who’d ever tried to draw her a picture of what that looked like was going to end up a grainy photo clipped to some examiner’s docket at the end of the day.

“Well, you’re wrong about one thing,” she murmured, “this is funny all over.”

* * *

 

Dumar didn’t give her a week before sending an unmarked car to pick her up outside her stoop, and Hawke had to hand it to Bran for finding her at all. Turning cat when she’d figured him the mouse through and through. Or maybe a rat, after all.

“Where are we headed, sugar?” She asked the driver. He wore no cap or City Hall badge, or much of an expression beyond something she’d see on a rooftop gargoyle. “Gonna be like that, huh? Okay.” 

They rolled through Hightown until Hawke recognized the route toward Redeemer Park.

“Alrighty,” she said. “I’ve got time for a quick stroll.” 

Dumar met her beside the statue of Hessarian, a grotesque thing for such a public piece of art, and one she’d always been keen on for its rawness. A fountain of tears burbled from between the hands clasped over Hessarian’s face, his heavy back carved into a stoop of perpetual sorrow. A sorrier son of a nug Hawke had never seen. 

“Do you read the paper much?” Dumar asked her, sweeping his cashmere overcoat against his rear to sit on the edge of the fountain where it wasn’t wet. 

“Enough to know when to put it down and look up,” she replied.

“I read the early edition of every publication in this city, even that true-crime rag your friend puts out,” he said, hands still in his pockets. So, Bran had been a busy bronto, Hawke smirked, connecting her to Varric. As she assessed the Mayor, she couldn’t see much of Saemus there, not in the eyes, but maybe in the helplessness. Dumar gave her a tight smile. “Writers see plots everywhere, even the ones who are supposed to be impartial.” 

“Sometimes they get it right, though,” Hawke said, sitting beside him because looking down at his bald head made her cringe; his liver spots, almost always covered by makeup when he was standing at a podium, were bare and plain. “That what this is about?” 

“Precisely,” Dumar said, nodding. He pulled his hands out to clasp them loosely between his knees, fingers tight inside a pair of Antivan leather gloves. When he spoke again, his voice lost its conspiratorial tone, the politician’s polish. Just someone’s father with more regret than power. “My son has never needed the things I’ve given him, and only ever wants what’s out of reach.” Dumar looked at her then, a shot of blue more familiar now than she’d thought at first, and he said, “Some things are beyond even me.”

Wouldn’t have mattered if Ashaad had ended up buried on page fourteen. It was the burying that made him news in the Dumar house, and Hawke wouldn’t have wanted to sit at that breakfast table for all the tea in Nevarra. 

“Can’t help you there,” she said, rubbing her palms down her jeans to her knees. If he’d lived, Ashaad could have been a lot of things, she guessed, but a cozy piece of arm candy on the crunchiest of the upper-crust was not among them. “And I can’t tell you that your boy doesn’t deserve better’n what he got. The lover, too. But, bull-heads have this city by the jewels, you don’t have to read the paper to know that, and pretty soon you won’t have to drive too far to see it yourself.” 

Dumar pursed his lips, swallowing, and the fountain sputtered behind them, spilling Hessarian’s tears like he knew what was coming. Varric would have given his left nut to pry on this conversation, but all Hawke wanted to do was make like a tree. 

“I need your help,” Dumar said, fully the Mayor again, and Hawke all but saw the drawbridge snap shut over the pain he’d shown her. 

“No offense, but my help is one thing you can’t afford.” She stood, a burning in her chest behind the rebel symbol on her t-shirt. “Call me when you have to make a choice between slinging dope for monsters and making it to the next sunrise.” 

“I’m only asking for a little information,” he said, getting to his feet, too. “As you pointed out, no one knows the Qunari, or Darktown, the way you do.” 

He stood, blocking the walkway without more than the bulk of his coat and the title he’d won from too many people just like him.

“There are other concerns, other plots that don’t make headlines,” he said, looking past her down Redeemer’s great lawn, dotted with couples on spread blankets and business ladies hunched over their novels with their legs tucked under them. 

He sounded like someone who’d never had to make a threat with his own voice. But it wasn’t exactly that. Hawke settled back on her heel. 

“Why don’t you put that picture in a frame for me, chief?” 

“General Stannard,” Dumar replied, voice soft as it had to be when calling out a demon. “With or without my intervention, all signs point to greater. . .restrictions. . .for your kind in this city.”

Hawke laughed. 

“What you know about ‘my kind’ could fit in a thimble, Mr. Mayor.” 

“She will twist the Qunari threat into something it’s not,” he replied, ignoring her snort. “No one wants to see that happen less than me. Except, perhaps, every mage in the city.”

“Bull-head gaat has jack shit to do with mages, that’s your boys and girls in blue not doing their job across the river where it _counts,_ ” she said. But her heart was rolling away with it, the certainty of Stannard’s plans like concrete shoes, and wasn’t that the point of a good story? One that convinced you that you’d thought of it yourself? “Tell me what you can do about putting more cruisers in Darktown and I’ll see what I can do about the bull-heads making a beeline for your honey pot.” 

His nod could have meant anything, but Dumar didn’t look away. It had to be as good as the handshake he couldn’t be seen offering her.

“Fine,” she said, jaw clenching hard enough to make her teeth squeak.

“You seem to be resourceful,” he said, sliding his hands back into his pockets, “Start at the top. The General’s offices are not heavily fortified at night.”

The Mayor had a knack for knowing the impossible, shit he couldn’t read in any paper, and Hawke wondered if the man wouldn’t make a spiffy blood-mage. 

“Don’t need a lift this time, big boy,” she said, sailing past and saluting the goon beside the car as she left Redeemer Park and headed for the subway.


	7. Chapter 7

Any day that a politician turned out not to be full of shit was a day Hawke had to wonder if everything she knew might be a little cock-eyed. 

Sitting in the backmost row of chairs among Kirkwall’s beleaguered looking for support, under the Chantry office’s huge windows that overlooked City Hall steps, she watched the templar shifts come and go. Sometimes she read _The Spill_ for a tenth or eleventh time, and sometimes she hooked her heels on the chair in front of her and leaned back, spitting sunflower seed shells into a paper cup. . .thinking of Merrill and Isabela fighting without her, some yarn for cat’s cradle that’d do just as well strung across an alley for a tripwire. 

Over a few hours she saw more gray uniforms than an army laundry service, marking which were the new recruits by their relentless polish, and which were the stormy veterans by their paunches and their slow strides. And then there was the Lieutenant. 

By rights he should have been a drooler. Hawke figured any officer with Cullen’s years would be blue around the gills and checked into a nuthatch. Which, she supposed, would be true of the General too. But Stannard was made of stern stuff. Any dwarf’d say she was rock-hewn, through and through. Though the only dwarf Hawke knew would call the General an unmitigated terror just from the sheer look of her. 

At any rate, Cullen was a problem; not just attentive, no that was bad enough. Hawke watched his thoroughness with the other templars, officers on down to recruits, and counted on one hand the number of times he forgot a face or a name. 

More than that, the Lieutenant was a believer.

His breaks were few and he spent them in the Chantry proper, kneeling beside the hopeless and weeping, offering spiritual succor as much as bureaucratic guidance. Hawke would’ve bet a sov that even with all that praying his knees didn’t even get dirty. But she’d known hard-worshippers in her life, picked them up off the floor and dodged their blades, too. No one bent their head so willingly who didn’t have something dark waiting for them every time they looked up. 

The golden boy had a weakness. Hawke should have kicked her own ass for not seeing it sooner. . .she only hoped her sister was up to the job of teasing it out. 

She put her boot heels back on the marble floor and left the Chantry by way of the Martial Forces office, wanting a closer look. But as she left the sunlit Chantry, sliding down the hallway toward templar headquarters, Hawke’s stomach dropped out, vacating her body in a swoop, and her heart protested the loss with a double-hard bang against her sternum. 

At a table in the very front, before the split staircase leading to the upper floors, sat all three of the Starkhaven kids she’d met, the dirty faces she remembered replaced by three cleaner versions. Placid expressions, minimally reddened by their new sunburst scars. Tranquil. 

She’d seen one as a kid, a vendor at a city carnival, but never knew why she was supposed to be afraid of them. Not even Bethany had ever seen one. A practice so unspeakable she’d been dumb enough to assume it was part of their history, a scary tale told to mage babies who thought they were hot shit. So it hit her especially hard, how the boogeyman was real, making more boogeymen as they went, making the worst connections any kid would ever make. 

As she watched, the big templar, Karras, propelled an older mage forward across the lobby, handcuffed, until he stood before the desk. The boy with the amber eyes who’d tried to talk to Hawke in the precinct just weeks before gazed up at the old mage who’s graying hair was wild above his frayed collar, and Hawke could barely breathe as the young man handed him a clipboard with a form. 

Hawke stared, she couldn’t help it, stock-still in the hallway, as people bumped past her. None of them cared. They’d been kids, just kids. . .now, they might as well have been furniture to the people working this infernal agency. 

It wasn’t a makerdamned storm any more. It wasn’t getting her kicks kicking the shit out of dealers and thugs so she could sleep at night. It was pulling Carver and Beth’s little heads against her ribs in the County Deputy’s office and willing herself not to lie to them ‘cause Ma wouldn’t have. 

It wasn’t going to be alright. 

Hawke spun against the foot traffic heading into the Martial offices, banging shoulders with the oblivious suits swirling around her, and went back through the Chantry with an unfamiliar rhythm pounding from her chest.

But it hadn’t been so long that a Freemarcher didn’t know the sound of war drums, and the slick shift of high boots, when they were coming over the hills.


	8. Chapter 8

“Oh, don’t you dare stop,” Hawke warned, the hot butter of bliss rolling under her skin, fingers curled tight over the couch cushion. “Anders, give up your crummy job and run away with me.” 

He didn’t look up, working the broadest part of his thumbs deeper. 

“Bless your soles,” he said, voice soft, and Hawke snorted across her legs at him. Anders paused the foot massage long enough to pass her a bottle of moonshine that’d been hugging the leg of his easy chair. It went down stiff and bright in her throat, and Hawke had been choking on its like for too long to put up a fuss. 

“This a private affair, or can anyone jump in on the action?” Came a tender request from the crack and creak of his door. Hawke swung her head to find Saemus Dumar fidgeting halfway clear of the dim hallway beyond. 

His door was never locked, and even if the doorjamb hadn’t been kicked in four times in the last year, even if there’d been a deadbolt. . .Anders wouldn’t have used it. 

His scrubs, like the easy flow of his magic, were always on. 

“What action there is,” Anders said, nodding and waving him inside. 

“Sorry to bust up the party I just-” He moved slow as molasses in winter, rubbing the length of an Oxford-cloth arm as recognition flitted across his face. Saemus nodded at Hawke. 

“Put your dogs up, young Dumar,” said Hawke patting the couch, dragging her bootless feet off Anders’ lap. “Come tell me a ghost story.” 

Anders stood, shaking his shaggy head like he’d always be apologising for her, and then he slipped down the narrow corridor toward the back of his apartment. They listened to him wrestling with the sticky drawers in his bedroom. 

“No, I don’t think I can do that,” Saemus said finally, but he sat on the opposite arm of the couch like maybe it wouldn’t take much to push him right off. He was still pretty, but Hawke saw the cut on his lip and the set of his jaw like those visible brushstrokes that make a work of art into something you want to touch. Saemus licked his lips. “You’ve tussled with Qunari, right? You were there when-” 

“Baby, I took as many bull-head punches as I gave,” she said, flopping back. “But strictly speaking, yeah, we tussled.”

“Don’t. Don’t call them that,” Saemus said, and Hawke liked the fire in it more than the sentiment. He put a foot on the couch and leaned a little toward her, sketching a quick look at her staff where it sat against the wall. “Father says they’ll be dealt with before too long. That I’m better off.” 

“Izzat right?” Hawke rolled the moonshine between her palms, Ma’s old dwarven ring clinking on the glass. “Dads sure know how to swear a blue streak about what’s best for you. Bet Ashaad never pulled that crap, am I right?” 

She didn’t smile over the bottle when she drank, but she watched without humor as Saemus’ jaw jumped, and how the press of those lips went from luscious to rigid with anger. 

“Hawke,” Anders sighed, returning from the back room to hand Saemus a paper sack. 

“S’okay,” she replied, putting her hands up before letting them hang limp over her knees, the moonshine rioting in the bottom of the bottle. “There’s not a body in Kirkwall now that can say they don’t have a mabari in this race.” 

Saemus narrowed his baby blues. 

“You said it. And thanks for what you did,” he said. He peeked into the bag and then rolled it tight. “Thanks for giving a damn.” 

“Doesn’t cost me much to give that.” But it wasn’t true. Saemus knew it, too, showed it in the white-knuckle grip he kept on the brown bag. Giving a damn wasn’t in most people’s budgets. 

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she added. 

“No one said I was,” Saemus replied, and she believed every syllable. “But there’s no such thing anyway.” 

He thanked Anders again and left quicker than he’d come, footsteps arguing with the hallway floorboards until Hawke couldn’t hear him any more. 

“What’d you give him?” 

“What he asked for.” 

She rolled her eyes at his back and Anders lit a joint, standing in his open door with the reefer smoke toiling toward the ceiling. He laughed, blowing on the cherry. “I gave the kid some joints spiked with elfroot and an ointment they won’t sell at the corner drug.” 

“Renegade.” 

“You could spend ten years sawing on bull-head horns, Hawke,” Anders said, turning. He leaned against the doorjamb, mostly long limbs under faded scrubs and cracked fingernails. “It won’t make a lick of difference, I’m telling you.”

She watched him scratch his stubble and cross his arms. Hawke looked at the floor between her feet, toes flexing on the bare linoleum. “Mm, you’re about to tell me what the real rumpus is?” 

“Don’t have to, it’s in your blood. And Bethany’s, and Merrill’s.” Anders toked and shifted against the doorframe. His eyes drifted shut behind the veil of smoke. “And mine.” 

“Save it for the soaps, sugar,” Hawke said quietly, thinking of Bethany getting caught up in those dramas, curled against Dad’s chest with a glass of juice. Their mouths were so drawn, worried, and so alike. 

Anders pushed away from the open door and straddled the arm of the sofa where Saemus had been. He passed the joint to Hawke and said, “We deserve better. Or at least not worse, the way it’s been going down lately.” 

She looked at the blackening paper tip, and the orange glow of easier things eating it away. 

“It’s worse for lots of reasons, though, and the Qunari are one big-ass obstacle.” Hawke pulled deeply on the brown burn of the weed, touched with elfroot, and held it down. Her eyes watered as she passed it back, and Anders was just a shifty blonde spirit behind the smoke when she finally let it go. “Horse and cart. Baby and the bathwater.” 

“Nugshit.” He swung a long leg over and scrunched down onto the sofa beside her. Hawke barely felt his head hit her shoulder. Her body sank and sank like the sand in the hourglass at the start of that show. When she closed her eyes, the bare-bulb light tracer that remained in the dark was the shape of a sunburst. 

“Everyone’s crowding the exits, Anders. You know how easy it is to stomp on rats when the ship is sinking?” she asked, waving away the joint when he held it up. The blood in the streets was gaat poison-green, or it was crazy vengeance from a desperate, opened vein, but it was there. Hawke patted his knee. “Between bull-heads and templars we’ve got enough boot heels to make a real dent in the vermin population.” 

“We’re not-”

“Nope,” she said, quicker than electric current, “but if that’s how they see us . . .it’s their mistake.”


	9. Chapter 9

The GTO carried Hawke through Darktown in its truest light: starless, an inkblot water-pocked with sea-green-vapor lights, the shambles of one district after another holding themselves up with patchy brick tenements, the glow of laundromats, the breath of the sewer slinking out over treadworn sneakers, and the screechy call of bars and diners. 

As she neared the bridge, though, Hawke spotted a cruiser pulled at a sloppy angle to the curb in front of Smith’s corner store. The two KPD officers leaned uneasily against the back of the car while a couple of young elves, and Smith himself in his half apron, sat handcuffed on the sidewalk. A templar paced the spotty concrete in front of them.

Hawke slowed, big engine growling down to a lower gear, and watched as the city’s policemen let a templar interrogate their suspects. If that’s even what they were. She wasn’t buying that week-old fish, and neither was the crowd gathering on the corner. A dwarf, backed by several humans with their work shirts rolled high over their biceps bellowed loud enough for the folks around the block to hear. “Get the fuck outta Darktown ya shitbird!”

Her grip on the stick stiffened. A grumbly taxi behind her honked. Hawke locked eyes with the tinman, who’d swiveled to survey the declining order on the street, and she wrenched the gear shift to burn rubber past a stale, yellow stoplight before it went red.

But red was what she was, hot with a shameful blaze of fear from her nose to her toes, and the burn of it stayed stuck under her nerves all the way across the bridge. It didn’t leave her as she dragged her feet up the stoop, and it crouched on her shoulder when she went inside the house. 

“If it’s as bad as it looks on your face I’m not sure I want to know,” Bethany said from the kitchen table. Carver glanced over his shoulder at Hawke as she tossed her staff, letting it gouge a hole in the wall before it thunked on the living room carpet.

“Yeah, your face is bad enough,” he said, turning back to his books. 

“Start with me tonight and you won’t like how it ends.” Hawke eased herself up onto the overhanging counter beside Merrill, who stopped trading ice-balls and entropy with Bethany long enough to scoot aside, giving Hawke’s black mood some room to breathe. 

“So, can we get into the Martial offices?” Merrill asked, catching a frosty bolt of light from Beth’s palm. 

“Yep, with a little help from Bethany.” With Cullen’s neon-obvious proclivity, it’d be a home run. One they desperately needed. 

“Oh?” Beth smiled, eyes glittering behind an orb of light before she tossed it to Merrill. 

“Just not sure it matters is all,” said Hawke. She rapped her nails hard on the edge of counter. “They’re tranking again. I spotted three in the lobby. . .like makerdamned mannequins in the window at Sax.” 

Merrill squashed the magic between her hands, rubbing her palms down her cutoffs and she turned her confused look to all three of the Hawke kids. But the eldest Hawke felt every inch of her old self, bone-tired, and an explanation was bile threatening her throat. 

“Tranquil,” Carver offered, catching Merrill’s eyes. He scissored his fingers. “Snipping the connection to the Fade.” 

“Bloody barbaric,” she murmured. 

“And there’s more,” Hawke added, rocking against her stiff elbows, the sight of Smith on his ass in front of the neighborhood still a searing reminder. She looked at Bethany. “Tinmen are kicking over anthills in Darktown. Dumar says it won’t take them long to get here.”

But her baby sister went on flipping pages with a serenity that boiled Hawke’s blood. But that was where she’d been before stepping foot inside, and the reasonable part of her had gone quiet as the grave. 

“What’s your problem, Beth? Don’t you have anything to say about that?” 

“You wouldn’t hear it if I did,” she said, not looking up. “Never have.” 

“Give it to me straight then.” Hawke leaned into it as she did every damn thing, heart first and a flame waiting behind it.

“Do you know what they say about us up North? About the way we hide?” Bethany asked. 

So it came down to the Tevinter newspapers? Hawke only wished her nose went that high. 

Bethany sighed. “It doesn’t translate perfectly, but in Tevene it goes ‘A dog that won’t defend itself finds masters in every house and yet deserves none.’” 

“They don’t know shit about what goes on here.” 

“Sis.” Carver kept his eyes down on his books, but Hawke wasn’t convinced he meant her. Bethany scraped her chair back and stood. 

“The government tells us where to go and what to do and how to be,” she said, poking a finger into the table beside her grimoire. “Father told us where to hide and what to say and how to escape. And now it’s you.” 

“Bethany,” Hawke started, voice falling short of Ma’s in too many ways. 

“That’s three sets of irons clapped around my neck and it’s nearly broken now.” Bethany curled her fingers under her grimoire and closed it softly. “I grew up in the same city you did. Had all the same choices made for me. It’s not too much to ask that you let me make one or two of my own.” 

Her voice had never been the loudest, but damn if it didn’t hit the hardest. Bethany was already across the house, stairs whining under her feet, when Hawke remembered to breathe again. Merrill’s small hand came to her back, rubbing circles. 

Carver slouched in his chair and Hawke envied, without meaning to, the easy hugeness of him and the steady hand he dragged over his face. 

“Don’t take it too hard,” he said, though if it’d been  _his_ tantrum, Hawke figured, he’d like it if she felt the sting long after he left the room. Somehow they were better for having Bethany. Carver laced his fingers behind his head and went on, “Hey, being bad at the mom and dad gig is already a raw deal, it can’t feel too good to stink at being a friend.” 

“To hear you two tell it, I wouldn’t know the difference,” Hawke replied. She slunk off the countertop and he stopped her when she moved past. 

“You have your moments.” 

And a moment would have to be good enough. They always were. Hawke pitched a sly smile to Merrill before snatching Carver in a headlock, scruffing up his hair until his big knees banged the kitchen table and he shouted  _Uncle!_ the way she always needed him to. 

As she passed the entry hall, meaning to make it right with Beth, Hawke spied a shape on the floor where their mail usually piled after a week or so. Mail had writing, though, and stamps on the front where this had neither, and she approached the plain, brown envelope like it might be spring-loaded. 

But it was just paper, and turning it over she found there was writing after all. 

_Hawke._  

She didn’t know this scribble. 

Taking it back to the kitchen, Hawke pushed aside the grimoire and sat in Bethany’s chair, marking how Merrill had traded her spot on the counter for a harder seat in Carver’s lap. They watched her unclasp the envelope and pull out a handful of photographs. 

“Who’s that from?” Merrill asked, letting go of Carver’s shoulder to reach across the table and finger a few of the prints. 

Bull-heads meeting with elves and humans in alleys so dark Howe had only caught their grainy profiles. The blatant sweep of horns behind the display window of a Lowtown grocery, the proprietor nothing but a shrinking exclamation mark behind his own counter. In one shot, Hawke saw what appeared to be a kid slinging gaat on a corner near Lyrene’s Secondhand, while the unmistakable shape of a templar in the background threw no shadow on the deal. 

Hawke shook her head. The cat was in the bag and the bag was in the river.

“A sneaky dick who knows better than to get in my face,” she muttered, running a thumbnail over the blurry templar’s shape. 

He’d gotten it right, though. There, in glossy black and white, was Kirkwall’s shifting front line. And they didn’t even know it. 

“Why aren’t they doing something?” Carver asked after taking the photo from her, eyes lost under the fall of his hair. 

“That’s the sixty-four thousand sov question,” Hawke replied. Whatever plan they’d worked out would have to jump to a quicker beat. She caught Merrill’s eye, jerking her chin toward the phone on the kitchen wall. “Call Isabela and Aveline.”

Hawke took the stairs two at a time, with all her ‘sorrys’ to Bethany thickening on her tongue.


	10. Chapter 10

They didn’t stick around past the first flip of Beth’s hair, and the honeysweet husk of her laugh echoing in the Martial Forces lobby. When it was clear, and Lieutenant Cullen couldn’t look anywhere but at her big eyes and maybe a little lower where his prayers wouldn’t follow, Hawke and Aveline bolted for the rear stairs. 

They pushed through the empty doorway and had to hiss for Isabela to join them instead of lingering around the corner to watch Bethany work.

But work it had, and they made it to the top floor without alerting any of the night guards. Stannard’s office occupied most of the upper floor at the end of a short hallway just off the elevator, and was guarded from behind a desk by a templar armed with both a shortblade and a wicked-looking lightning club. 

The three of them crouched just inside the open stairwell. 

Isabela cracked her knuckles. 

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Aveline whispered from behind Hawke. 

“Then cover your ears, Big Girl,” said Isabela and started to move out into the hall.

“Wait. The General’s already nervous nellie,” Hawke said, staying Isabela with couple of fingers snagged under her belt. “If we knock him out she’ll go bananas on security and who knows what else.” 

“She’ll do that anyway,” Isabela shot back. “One less tinman when the shit hits the fan.” 

“Both of you shut up,” Aveline said, “and listen.” 

In the quiet hallway, under the glow of his one little lamp, the templar began to snore. 

“Nobody’s this lucky,” Hawke whispered around the smile that crept into her mouth. 

“Nobody _we_ know.” Isabela reached into her cleavage and pulled out a glass vial. She shook it, wrenched the stopper out with a flash of white teeth, and eased into the hall. “Just making sure our luck sticks. Hold your noses, babies.” 

Aveline and Hawke clamped hands over their faces as Isabela sent the tube sailing, end over end toward the templar, trailing pinkish fog as it went. In a twinkle, the desk and chair burbled with rosy smoke and his snores deepened like a dragon’s, filling the upper floor hallway. Even his chair groaned as the templar slumped heavily into unconsciousness.

Isabela sauntered into the light, all platform perfection and self-satisfaction, and Hawke bounded after her with Aveline following close behind. They passed the giant windows looking out over the City Hall steps, Andraste’s shadow so small in the statue’s floodlights from this high up, and Hawke barely missed a step as she dug the key out of her pocket, slipped it into Stannard’s door, and ushered the others inside. 

It wasn’t a swanky office, and the General kept a surprising amount of clutter for someone they’d pegged for a neat-nut. Cleanliness, Hawke sniffed, wasn’t so close to holiness after all. Running her gloves over the stacks of files, the bits of foreign pottery and picture frames caked with dust, it hit her that Stannard probably didn’t want custodial fingers poking around her things, even to clean. She looked at the key still in her hand, pocketed it, and silently reminded herself to send Jethann an obscene box of chocolates on top of his usual pay. 

“Start shaking the trees, see what falls out,” she said, and pointed Aveline and Isabela toward three stout filing cabinets against the wall. 

As they dragged the creaking drawers open Hawke moved behind the General’s desk. Here she found low piles of reports in their green leatherette folios stamped with Kirkwall’s seal. Among the nonsense there were files on recruit activities, crime stats, letters from vocal citizens concerned about their districts. There was even a slim file filled with nothing but anonymous threat letters. Hawke hummed behind her teeth. 

“Nothing yet,” Aveline mumbled, slipping each sheaf of papers back gingerly. Beside her Isabela shook her head and sighed. 

“If I ever want to be bored to tears I know where to come,” she said, and pulled another file. “We’ve got squat over here, Hawke. What about you?” 

She’d knelt on the floor to wiggle her pocket knife into Stannard’s locked desk drawer, being careful about scratches on the brass plate. “We’re about to see.” 

Inside, tucked in a blank, brown folder, lay a handful of reports from outside Kirkwall, Freemarch Martial constabularies writing to Stannard on the progress of some project with a name they wouldn’t dare bang out on a typewriter. Ansburg, Ostwick, and Starkhaven letterhead with templar lieutenants’ names signed beneath, small, like these turkeys hadn’t wanted to put their mark on it at all. She thought, murkily, of Bran scraping Darktown off his fine shoes. 

The topmost letter was her ace in the hole and Hawke set the rest aside. 

“Stop the presses and hold the phones, chickadees. We’ve got a winner,” she said, unsmiling. Standing in the flat moonlight slashing across Stannard’s mess of work, she read the letter twice before looking up to find Aveline beside her and Isabela sitting on the far end of the desk, waiting. What she swallowed went down bitter as dry aspirin, and Hawke went on to paint the gist because the whole would have choked her. “The Lieutenant in Starkhaven wants to know which way the General wants him to zig now that the city zagged. Their plan backfired worse than a Pinto on a steep hill.” 

“And what plan was that?” Aveline asked, leaning knuckle-hard on Stannard’s blotter. 

“Far as I can tell they staged a break-in,” replied Hawke, jaw popping, “The idea being to make it look like somebody stole boxes full of redcard files, blood and all.” 

“And they got a little more blood than they bargained for?” 

“Bingo,” Hawke said, shooting Isabela a pointed finger. “They went for an authentic B and E, damn fools. Didn’t tell security. There was a shootout, a fire. At the end of the day they lost the files and a whole lot more.” 

“The trust of the people they were supposed to protect.” 

Somehow it didn’t feel right to point at Aveline. Hawke nodded instead. 

“Those kids, the tranks,” Isabela murmured, looking out the window. “For what?”

Hawke sat, finally, in Meredith’s big chair, sagging into it the way a too-small foot spreads inside the wrong shoe. Meredith...and that’s _who_ she was, not _what_ she was. 

Up high they couldn’t hear the city. It didn’t bark and bite at them, or whistle or beg. From these windows, Kirkwall wasn’t the dishrag scent of twenty-four-hour diners, and it wasn’t the blacklung promise of toll-booth operators clapping each other’s backs at the end of a shift. A General served her people, not the other way around, and the view from up here was as dangerous as if there’d been no windows at all. 

Because the easiest people to protect were the ones who never talked back, or put up a fuss when protection rolled right into possession.

Even with the city winking back at Hawke from the enormous corner windows, even with her suspicions naked as a calendar girl on the page in her hands, it didn’t feel hot the way scoring a win always did. Dumar had the title, and his desk was probably nicer, but this was the seat of power in their town. And it smelled like the bottom of an ashtray. 

Hawke put her boots on the desk, leaning back to hand Aveline the letter.

“I wonder what Her Frostiness sent in response?” Aveline said after scanning it. 

“You can bet it wasn’t a fruit basket,” Hawke replied, and watched with a tingle of pride as Aveline plucked a spy camera from inside her duster, switched on Meredith’s desk lamp, and smoothed the letter out to snap off some shots of it. “Why, Chief, I’m surprised at you.” 

“Stuff your surprise. It’s not admissible but it’s...” Aveline paused, folding the little camera up with a frown, “necessary leverage.”

The chair squawked when Hawke tipped it, and she looked down into the open drawer that’d hid Stannard’s worst secret. She found that secrets, like hooligans and street dogs, always seemed to travel in packs. And the pack she was seeing in the bottom of the drawer, tucked behind a discreet divider, was of the expensive, Orlesian tobacco variety. 

Time was, her Ma had done a similar thing, keeping a pack of smokes wrapped in plastic inside the toilet tank, smoking out of the bathroom window like a schoolgirl in the shadow of the gymnasium. Habits had personality. Hawke snagged the pack of cigarettes and held it to her nose, inhaling what hadn’t gone stale just yet. 

So the General had a grip like a vice, and vice like anyone else? That’d do just fine. 

The pack, with its sunset-silhouetted wyvern on the side, went into Hawke’s pocket, the letters went back in the drawer, and the three of them went tip-toeing past the sonorous sleeping templar on their way out of the upper offices. 


	11. Chapter 11

“Hey, turn it up, willya?” Varric swept his open hand toward the TV over the bar and Corff shrugged. 

“Do it yourself, shitbird.” 

“Daisy, darlin’,” he said to Merrill, in the sweetest register a scoundrel could manage, “Would you mind?” 

Hawke watched Merrill gulp down half her beer with a nod and climb over the back of the booth, barefooted and bouncing. She mounted the bar, standing with her sooty ankles among the Man’s beer taps and wet-curled coasters, and jacked the volume a quarter turn until the nightly news bellowed out. 

The static shot of KPN’s news anchor cut away, and Hawke watched, past Merrill’s small shoulders, as a familiar stretch of the coastline appeared on the TV. A familiar white sheet, too.

“Get off!” Corff whipped his bar towel at her legs and Merrill jumped down, sure as a doe, joining Hawke on a nearby barstool. 

“ _The discovery of the Mayor’s son on the Wounded Coast is under ongoing investigation, but police have issued a statement declaring that until further evidence can be salvaged Saemus Dumar’s death is being ruled a suicide.”_  

“Stones,” Varric muttered. “I figured the Fontleroy for a smarter kid than that.” 

“He is,” said Hawke, fingering Stannard’s pack of cigs where she’d laid them on the bar. “Was.” 

“They were in love,” said a voice from the dark curve of Varric’s booth. Hawke swiveled her stool to nod at Bethany, who reflected the loss prettily for someone who’d only seen Dumar through glass. “Was it bad? Enough to go back there and join his man?”

“Not like that, nuh-uh.” Hawke slid off the stool, cutting Corff a look that had him grumbling to dig the clicker out of his apron pocket. The TV went mute and Hawke paced the Hanged Man’s floor. “Saemus wasn’t out to off himself. He was angry. Piss-on-your-grave angry.”

And it’d been a damn sight better than seeing him bleed out in her backseat. It was no kind of triumph to find she’d only delayed the inevitable. To a Hawke, any one of them, nothing deserved to be spat on so gleefully as inevitability. 

“Who’s grave are we pissing on?” Isabela’s bright dress and her stomping heels ricocheted in the Man’s dingy recesses as she led Fenris through the alley door and into the back hallway. 

“Dunno, you tell me,” replied Hawke, meeting them in the middle. She got a kiss from Isabela and whiff of Fen’s wharfside perfume before he tugged her close for one himself. 

“If I don’t have the good sense to hate you for this,” he mumbled against her lips, “then I deserve what I get.” 

Hawke gripped the long hair at the back of his head, smiling at the perfect Kodak picture he made, on the docks, shouldering load after load of the day’s catch under the shadow of bull-head stares. 

“Gaw, Broody! You smell like a whale’s asshole,” Varric said when Fenris passed the booth on his way to the bar.

“The consequence of taking a job without asking questions,” he shot over his shoulder.

“And how was the job?” Hawke asked.

Fenris shrugged his shoulders, silver-spiked epaulets flashing and then dull again. He curled over the pint Corff pushed in front of him. 

“The dead Qunari does not rank high on their topics of conversation,” he started, sipping. Hawke sat beside him and slid Meredith’s expensive pack of smokes in front of him. He tapped one against the bar, tucked it between his lips and went on. “But there were some who mentioned it, and not in the same breath as. . .romantic blame, you could say.” 

“What’s the skinny, then?” asked Isabela. 

He exhaled, and took another drink. 

“That he died doing his job, or because of it,” Fenris said. “His last assignment was to survey the coast, farther out, and report back.” 

“And one of those things happened, but not the other.” Hawke watched him nod. A glint of something new on the front of his patchy vest caught her eye and she poked a finger up under it; a tie pin for an elf who’d never worn anything close to silk around his neck. It was square, overlapping v-shapes in red and gold, and Hawke crooked an eyebrow at it. 

“An invitation,” Fenris said, taking her hand and laying it on his thigh. “In the event I find myself in need of a career change.” She squeezed her _thank you_ onto the stretch of muscle and leather jumping under her palm, and he chuckled to himself without looking at her.

“You need a bath, hon,” Isabela said to him. 

“I need a miracle,” he replied, flapping his vest and running a hand through his hair. It sent a fresh wave of fish-stink out over the bar and Hawke kicked at his heavy boots. 

“Go, both of you,” she said. 

Fen looped a loose arm around Isabela as they went out the way they came, back-door connoisseurs wreathed in Fen’s smoke, and she caught a wink from Isabela as the door clanged shut. 

Hawke raked her own hair, sighing hard. She scooped up Fen’s abandoned pint. 

“If the Qunari scout had a penchant for pillow talk,” Varric offered, pulling his specs off, “there’s not much that don’t connect that dot straight to the soggy shit they pulled out of the water this morning.” 

“You said it.” Hawke eased into the booth beside Bethany. 

“Love shouldn’t be dangerous or deadly,” Bethany murmured, and Merrill nodded from her perch on the back of the booth.

“Not like that,” she said, melancholy drooping along the corners of her mouth.

“You take what you can get, Sunny girl. And sometimes that’s the shaft,” Varric said. He caught Hawke’s eye across the low collection of beer glasses and _Spill_ issues. He’d asked for her stories for years, stamping them down on raggy newsprint with lies for names and everything else true as the day was long. And she’d never tell anyone how good he was at that part, never bust up the writer’s privilege. 

Varric patted Beth’s hand and added, “Do it wrong or do it right, love’s like sliding down a razor blade into big glass of lemonade.”

They all drank to that, for Saemus Dumar. They drank to that because they couldn’t just let it lie.


	12. Chapter 12

Sunset covered Hawke in another nasty bit of darkness as she trudged through what should have been an empty house to find trouble where it hadn’t lived before. Soon enough she knew it’d been there all along. 

Her fault, she guessed with a sour twist of her mouth, for being the soft touch in their family. 

Upstairs, behind a half-closed door, she found Carver unzipping a stiff garment bag hung over the closet. And it was the well-worn habit of siblings in close quarters that kept him from flinching when Hawke did what he’d call ‘barging in’ and crossed the room. 

“Do you want me to explain or are you just gonna-” 

She ignored him, but he didn’t step back or sit down hard on the end of his bed when she fumed past him.

“The everloving fuck is this?” Hawke jerked the bag open and it responded by making her reel with the force of a backhand from the types of cats who normally wore what was inside. “What did you do?” 

“It’s not what I did, it’s what I’m going to do,” Carver said slowly, and he reached around her not to zip up his shame, but to expose it further, sliding the bag all the way off. He looked down into Hawke’s face, all that broadness and still red-faced for her approval, and said, “Make a difference.” 

“You always were the worst comedian,” she said, and felt the string in her legs give up, just a little. Her baby brother . . .a tinman traitor. “Carver, you can’t.” 

Carver balled up the garment bag and hucked it into the closet. 

“It’s not. . .look it’s not a perfect plan, but it’s worth the old college try,” he said.

Lightning raged up her calves, jerked along her arms, and she shoved Carver’s chest with a pointless pair of fists.

“What about giving _college_ the old college try like you’d planned?”

“Like _you_ planned,” Carver replied, stepping back when Hawke gave him no scrap of space to live in where he wasn’t swallowed up by how big she actually was. 

His room, his life, and it made no difference how long they’d shared it. Their name looked like a curse stitched onto the patch of his new uniform, and Hawke couldn’t stare at anything but that. Carver crossed his arms, knuckles tight. 

“We’re too good at getting used to things,” he said.   
  
Hawke moved like a drunken shadow, tear-blind and mute, through the hall and down the stairs. And it was quiet in the house from the rafters to the baseboards, so she heard him on the landing even with her blood drumming. “If you can change that so can I.” 

With her hand on the front door, Hawke nodded to no one, voice clotted as she replied, “Tell it to the Maker when your sisters get the brand.” 

If he snapped back she didn’t know. Hawke’s palm found the GTO’s shift before she knew how her body had left the house, and her eyes went sandy and dry after the third intersection. 

She headed for KPD headquarters on an undeveloped instinct. Rolling past Smith’s corner store, seething at the steady gait of a pair of templars who patrolled in front of Vincento’s Home Goods, Hawke’s grip on the wheel worsened like a sore.

People on the street, Hawke’s neighbors and her sometimes-enemies, eyeballed the tinmen with bold faces and a menacing promise unmuttered on the chap of their lips. And that’d be her brother’s luck, her luck, if it went down. 

She revved the GTO and pointed it dead-on for the police station as Andoral Street hummed beneath her tires. Only one gal in her life had ever worn a uniform, and made it look less like a choke-chain or a bad joke than Hawke thought possible. So it hurt, like helping sometimes does, to aim herself at Aveline with a fight brewing in her chest. 

At the station, Hawke nestled the GTO in a dark corner of the parking lot, locked her staff in the trunk, and hot-footed it up the piss-stained stairs instead of taking the elevator. 

She met Aveline at the pit when Donnic buzzed her up. That they were among a straggly few cops who remained after their shift surprised Hawke not a bit. Loyalty did that. Maybe a stubborn streak a mile long, too. And though the interim Chief looked tired as all void, her badge shined hard and bright as First Day bells on a chantry door. Damn if Hawke wasn’t blinded by it every time. 

“Come on back,” Aveline said, a quick flit of fingers waving Hawke past Hendyr’s desk and into the big office at the rear. Donnic slapped Hawke’s palm as she stalked passed. 

“Good to see you again,” he said. 

Hawke banged the door shut, too much hurt stiffening her muscles, setting Aveline’s picture frames to rattle out some of her unspent violence. 

“Promise me one thing,” she said, pacing the dull, orange carpet. “When I kill my brother, promise you’ll wait till I’m stinking drunk to arrest me.” 

Halfway to sitting in her big, swivel chair, Aveline stopped and stood upright. 

“So he’s done it then? Joined the Martial Forces?” She came back around her desk.

“Of all the boneheaded. . .yes. How did you know?” Hawke pulled up short, quit pacing, and rounded on Aveline, who settled her rear against what was so different from Stannard’s. Aveline’s desk was ordered, solid, and as Chief she’d made it as much Hawke’s home as her own. She stretched her long legs out, arms crossed, and fixed Hawke with her maddening, green blaze of honesty. 

“Carver has a mind to do right by the city,” Aveline said, ducking her head to catch Hawke’s eyes when she looked away. Because that didn’t fly, not when honor was more important than ignominy. She went on. “He only knows two people who already do that. Couldn’t talk to one, so he came to the other.”

Hawke exhaled, groaning, planting her fists on the same desk where they’d hatched a hundred heroic schemes, ate a hundred bad hot dogs over _The Spill_ , and blew no smoke where sun didn’t shine because you treated a soldier better than that. She looked up, out the window at the open wound of dusk on the skyline, bleeding down Kirwall’s tight corridors and over the river of traffic. Hawke said, “Why didn’t you tell me? Warn me?” 

“I love you like a sister, Hawke, but if you were mine I’d kick your ass,” Aveline replied.

“Me and Beth. . .we deserve better,” she said with Anders’ voice. Hawke turned to lean on the desk, her mess of rub-worn boots and the unmatched stack of studded belts awkward beside Aveline’s pressed jeans and spit-shined shoes. 

“So you do,” said Aveline. “And there’s your answer.”

“Aveline-”

“I’ve heard enough bad reasons for joining up to recognize a good one,” she went on, and Hawke closed her eyes to find little comfort in the flashbulb snaps of her family, their forever young faces, creeping behind her eyelids. Aveline spoke soft and low. “He’s got a good one, a couple in fact,” she said, standing at last to look at Hawke. “Cut him some slack.” 

“That boy’s made of slack,” said Hawke, rising too, and feeling heat of different cut and color flood her skin. She snorted and said, “You never saw someone so fixed on getting hard.”

Then, she pursed her lips and stood, making tracks for the door, feeling less like the ghost of the girl who’d done it a thousand times before. And a thirst for a whiskey and jukebox remedy fed her like rocket fuel.

“Where are you going?” 

“To get loose,” Hawke replied, grinning and lifting Aveline’s leather duster off the coat-stand by the door. “You coming?” 

She tossed it into waiting hands.

“Right behind you,” said Aveline.


	13. Chapter 13

It was Aveline who got her drunk, and Aveline’s hard-as-void shoulder she’d leaned on, but Hawke knew that, in part, what came next was a lonesome task. Like every bunch of letters and piece of family flotsam with her name half cracked and worn off of it. . .lonely fit. So, she kissed Isabela’s cheek where the pillow creases crept up, and haunted her own house in the hangover haze of morning light until she found her keys. 

Carver had stayed gone, at least for a night, and Hawke figured it was the smartest thing he’d done since the kid wore short pants and shared Otter pops with Beth out on the stoop. And Bethany? Hawke stood in the kitchen, face turned up to the ceiling. The floorboards moaned a little, but her sister didn’t come down.

Hawke cupped a handful of water from the kitchen faucet and splashed her face; a cold slap better than a warm lie any day. She drank tepid, black coffee, snatched an apple out of the bowl on the table, and left the house at the sixth chime of her grandma’s mantle clock.

A half hour later, Hawke sat in the oily chill of a near-empty parking garage with the GTO’s tailpipe chugging and barbed wire growing in her chest. 

Meredith Stannard didn’t walk a beat in this town, _her_ town, and Hawke had the brick and mortar of true loyalty behind her. If she took one and chucked it through the General’s window in broad daylight there’d be consequences. And if she did nothing there would be more of the same.

Like always, it only mattered which ones were worse to live with.

Hawke turned off the car, grabbed her staff, and made tracks. 

She passed through the crowd inside City Hall, rustling against the black-draped statues that mocked as much as they mourned, and found the Chantry’s reception area fogged with the soupy mix of white lilies and too many warm bodies in the pews. Martial had its hands full of wailing citizens, half of them distraught for Dumar and the other half seething over bull-head crime. It was bad, but for once that was good. 

Hawke didn’t even need the back stairwell, she walked straight into the first open elevator and rode it to the top.

In the hall outside Stannard’s office, though, she hit a wall. It was shaped like a pious templar with deep purple smudged under his eyes and less sense than the Maker gave a bronto. Lieutenant Cullen was flanked by a pair of recruits, a man and a woman, that Hawke hadn’t marked before, but they were alone, and he put up his hand to stop her when she angled for Stannard’s door. 

“Miss, you can’t be up here,” he said, and his eyes drilled her to a halt. “Ruvena, please escort this mage back downstairs.” 

“Oh, the General and I have an appointment,” Hawke replied and watched Cullen’s eyes cut to a point somewhere over her shoulder. But not back at the General’s office behind him. Hawke laced her fingers together, smiling. “Wouldn’t wanna keep her waiting.” 

“The General hasn’t taken appointments in over a month. D’you think I’m a complete idiot?” Cullen asked, and after a split-second he put a hand to his forehead. 

A thousand smart-mouthed replies rushed upstream like wriggling salmon against the back of her teeth, but a staticy squawk at Cullen’s hip stopped her. He unclipped his walkie and the voice inside it surprised Hawke. The General sounded keen and hard, authority wielded with a lion’s guttural calm. 

“ _Get downstairs and re-assign your teams. The Mayor wants to address the crowd. Media are pulling up now. Over.”_  

“Yes ma’am,” replied Cullen. His eyes never left Hawke’s except to flick across her staff. “There’s a mage here who says she’s got an appointment with you. Over.” 

A short pause followed, and then the crisp crackle of the walkie again. 

“ _I deal with her. Get downstairs. Over and out.”_  

The radio went back on his belt and Cullen gave Hawke a nod. 

“You trust me alone with the General?” she asked in that way her daddy always had. Not caring about the answer as much as the discomfort. 

“You’ve never met her,” Cullen said, and crossed his arms. The pitch of his voice wavered when he went on, lying but not for any reason Hawke could see. “If I’m concerned. . .it’s not for her.” 

“Aren’t you the sweetest? I’m touched,” she said, pressing a hand to the peeling, painted symbol on her chest. 

Cullen was tall, and he used it by swallowing up the space between them.

“If you don’t show your face downstairs in ten I’ll send Ruvena here and Paxley up to get you.” 

Hawke nodded and made for the door, but Cullen stopped her.

“She’s on the roof,” he said, chin jerking toward the emergency stairs, ones Hawke knew better he might believe. The Lieutenant rubbed his face where too much stubble was already showing, and licked his lip. “When things are bad. . .well, there’s only so much one person can do.”

Hawke gazed at the door, propped open with a rubber doorstop. Wind moaned down the cement stairwell and flapped the papers tacked to a nearby corkboard. 

“She up there a lot lately?” asked Hawke, blinking.

The three templars moved past her while she stared and her feet went gluey. Cullen pushed the elevator button and didn’t answer the question or look up when he said, “Don’t overstay your welcome.” 

“Ten-four, Lieutenant,” Hawke replied, heading for the stairwell and watching their faces disappear behind the sliding doors as she went.

* * *

The rooftop wind buffeted Hawke as soon as she stepped out, the sound of Kirkwall’s morning rush-hour bleating up the side of the building, reminding her that just over an hour before she’d been warm in bed with Isabela’s leg between hers and only a headache on her to-do list.

General Stannard sat with a knee drawn up, back straight as an ironing board, between the ranks of enormous, bronze guardians that lined City Hall’s precipice. Other places had dragons for gargoyles, or golems crouched at each corner. Kirkwall preferred its sour-faced warriors in heavy plate. Stannard looked right at home, even in grey wool. 

Hawke had a breathless moment of clarity, imagining the child’s portion of force magic it would take to simply send the General over the edge. Would she scream? 

Hawke shook her head, wind whipping hard enough to make her eyes water. 

“Tell me your business and get your ass back downstairs,” Stannard barked without turning around. “You have five minutes.” 

From behind, Hawke watched her light a fresh cigarette, a workaday unit of time measurement that was easy to recognize, even among people who hid their predilections. When they were side by side, Hawke leaning on the statue beside Stannard’s, the General held her pack out, waiting, unable to see it as the opening where a blade might stick.

Hawke slid the purloined pack from her back pocket as gingerly as if she were setting a landmine, and pulled one for herself. 

“Thanks, I managed to dig up some of my own,” she said, her raging heartbeat drowned by the wind as Stannard’s eyes flared. Hawke knelt, plucked the lighter from the General’s hand and said, “A healthy vice builds character.” 

They stared at one another, Hawke assessing Stannard’s hair, wound tightly in a bun, and the flinty eyes that turned with deliberation back to the city below. Over the bouncing traffic noise, and some shouting that Hawke couldn’t place, Stannard went on. 

“You were going to tell me about weakness Miss . . .?” she said, trailing off until a name was offered. 

“Hawke.” She smoked, looking at her cigarette and how the smoke was lost the to the gusts the moment it seeped out. “No! I’m just curious to meet the new woman in my brother’s life. The one he serves so _enthusiastically_.”

“Your brother, like me, serves the city, the country, and the Maker,” Stannard said, and took a drag, too. “He’s lucky to have a sister like you. So protective.” Her eyes traveled the length of Hawke’s staff. “Still, you could learn a few things from him.” 

“You sure it’s not me who’s lucky?” she asked. “What’s safer for a mage than a templar in her own family, huh?” 

“It’s family that makes you safe,” replied Stannard with a smile like a photo-negative. “Or soft.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” Hawke clucked and crossed a leg in front where she leaned, toeing the ground-up cement pebbles littering the roof. She kicked a few off the edge, light enough that the wind carried them. “Sounds an awful lot like a threat.”

“If I’m any judge, I’d say you know the sound of it better than me.” It was an old hat-trick, mirror and mimic, and Stannard swept up a handful of debris with the cigarette gripped in her teeth. “You look like you’ve seen trouble,” she said, rolling the pebbles in her palm.

“More like trouble’s seen me,” replied Hawke, and it did, gazing back at her with a fist full of rocks and iceberg eyes. What went on under the current and floe, Hawke could only guess. So, she did, betting sovs to sweetrolls that Stannard had spent too much time standing above it all to remember what the ground felt like as it rushed to meet her face. Hawke pushed away from the statue, and turned to face the tiger. “I don’t like bending my knees too much, you know? Easy to forget what upright feels like.”

Her cigarette finished, Hawke pinched and flicked it into the wind that was busy flattening Stannard’s well-starched lapels. The cig sailed away, still glowing. Stannard ground hers out, dropped the rocks she’d been jostling in her palm, and stood up. 

“An idealist,” she said with a tilt, jerking her uniform neat again. The General was taller than Hawke, but not by much, and it counted less than nothing. Not when true fear rode up in black, convertible Caddies. She’d faced the horns of Stannard’s scape-goats, and they were bigger and meaner than the woman who abided them. 

“A pugilist. Downright _bull-headed,_ ” Hawke countered. She stuck her thumbs in her belt and said, “My sister would say that idealism seems to come in every flavor but peaceful.” 

The General dusted her hands slowly and then held one out toward the stairwell door. 

“Time’s up,” she said, dead as fallen leaves. “Let me take you down.”

Somewhere below, over the last gasp of the morning rush, sirens blurted and wailed, sounding close and far like the city was throwing its own voice.

* * *

In the Martial offices, Stannard led Hawke through the administration wing, one vast room after another crammed with clacking typewriters and the here-and-there jangle of telephones.

They came out in a dispatch center and Hawke spotted Aveline’s orange leather duster. If anyone could stand next to Lieutenant Cullen’s bulk and make it look pitiful, it was Chief Vallen. And she didn’t smile when she saw Hawke coming.

“Looks pretty stormy over there.” The General’s voice at her back was mild.

“I expect to weather worse’n that,” she replied with a sweet smile. She headed down the narrow aisle between dispatch desks, a broad swath of cubicles brimming with voices spreading out on either side of her, when she suddenly stopped and jogged back to Stannard.

Hawke retrieved the pack of smokes and pressed them into her hand with a humorless wink. If Stannard gave her any response, she missed it.

Strolling back down the aisle, she saw that red head already shaking, shoulders rigid, and Aveline opened her mouth for the shitstorm Hawke had earned coming here, but all that spilled out was a cacophony of ringing phones. First to the left of her and then to the right, one jingle tone bleeding into the next as the dispatchers flailed to answer.

Stannard entered the aisle, eyes wide, and Cullen came up behind Aveline.

Around them, the dispatchers, elves and humans and more than a few dwarves, began shouting into their handsets. Quick as a chain of lighting, the ringing lines were joined by all the dispatcher voices at once. Hawke couldn’t tease apart one conversation from another, but panic felt like nothing else, and it infected everything. 

A dark girl, no more than twenty, stood up. Hawke watched her, black eyes searching to find her friend over the short cubicle walls, and another girl across the aisle, who wore a cardigan clipped over her Martial shortsleeves, also stood. They both yanked their headsets off, eyes locked. 

“What the void is going on?” Stannard bellowed above the continual harassment of telephones ringing their makerdamned bells off. The sound of her shouting barely kept up with how the phones fractured the air. More dispatchers stood. 

A dwarven man with a handlebar mustache lurched into the aisle. 

“Riot!” he yelled, turning and turning in the ongoing din until he settled on Hawke’s face. In his, she read all the horror her dad’s old penny dreadfuls could never conjure.“It’s a riot from Darktown, spreadin’ toward th-” 

A heart-thickening boom shuddered across the building, pulling a wave of gasps from everybody and rattling the glass panes.

“Hawke!” Aveline growled over the top of the dwarf’s head, but Hawke was already bolting past, the terror of templars erased. She ran alongside the few poor suckers who’d recovered from the blast quickest and were making their way like spooked livestock toward the Chantry. 

She didn’t feel Aveline behind, didn’t breathe or think of anything but the speed of her feet and the red edge of panic clawing at her vision, not until the stiff press of people dispersed through the Chantry’s flung-open doors. Out on the concrete waterfall splay of City Hall’s steps, Hawke rocketed past Andraste’s statue and came to a stumbling stop with Aveline gripping her arm. 

“No,” Hawke croaked, feeling more denials behind it; bees swarming around their missing hive.

Down the boulevard, where the traffic entered and emptied from the hazy portal to Darktown, they could see straight through the bridge and beyond, like always. But, what waited over the river was a mute writhing of people and cars.

Bedlam begging at a distance, but rising. And all of it shadowed by a tower of greasy black smoke that devoured the mid-morning sun.

Hawke ripped her staff from its sling. Aveline nodded, twisting back for her shortblade.

They ran as the first sirens cried.

 

_**TO BE CONTINUED. . .** _


End file.
